I 



I 





la'Bs 



GIH) 



The 



Religions of the World 



AND 






The World-Religion. 



Hn irnttobuctton to tbetr Scientitlc Stub^. 



BY : ci 



WILLIAM F. WARREN. 



BOSTON: 

No. 12 SOMERSET STREET, 

1895. 




&M^ 




Copyright, 1892, 1895, 

by 
William F. Warren. 






•^ 



■^% 



CONTENTS. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

Chapter. 

I. Subject-Matter of the Study 
II. Admissibility of the Scientific Method 

III. Procedures and resulting Groups 

IV. Sources, Proximate and Remote 
V. Personal Equipment .... 

VI. Auxiliary Sciences ... 
VII. Attractiveness, Utility, and Perils of the Study 

BOOK FIRST. 

The Religious Phenomena of the World Historically Considered. 

Introduction . • . 

Division First. 

History of Particular Religions and of their Subordinate Forms 

Division Second. 

History of Religious Manifestations common to several Religions ; 
culminating in Comparative Histories of related Religions . 

Division Third. 

History of Religious Manifestations common to all Religions ; cul- 
minating in a universal History of the World-religion . 



Page. 

5 
8 

12 

15 
i6 

17 
i8 



25 



28 



40 



42 



BOOK SECOND. 

The Religious Phenomena of the World Syste?natically Considered. 

Introduction 45 

Division First. 

Systematic Exposition of Particular Religions and of their subordi- 
nate Forms .......... 47 



Conte?its. 



Division Second. 

Systematic Exposition of Religious Manifestations common to 
several Religions ; culminating in Comparative Theologies of re- 
lated Religions ......... 

Division Third. 

Systematic Exposition of Religious Manifestations common to all 
Religions ; culminating in a universal Science of the World- 
Religion .......... 



Page. 



49 



SO 



BOOK THIRD. 

The Religions Phenomena of the World Philosophically Considered. 

Introduction .......... 

Division First. 

Philosophy of the data implying and variously^ illustrating the true 
Object of Religion and His personal Bearing over against the 
Subject in the unity of the World-religion .... 

Division Second. 

Philosophy of the data implying and variously illustrating the true 
Subject of Religion and His personal Bearing over against the 
Object in the unity of the World-religion ..... 

Division Third. 

Philosophy of the data implying and variously illustrating the past, 
present, and future Inter-relations of Object and Subject as grad- 
ually determined and redetermined in the one vital historic move- 
ment or process of the World-religion 

Notes and Queries Illustrative of the Text 
Collateral Reading and Study 
Specimen Topics for Class Papers 
Specimen Studies, No. i . . . . 
** " No. 2 . . . 



55 



59 



6i 



65 

75 

93 

95 

99 
121 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Subject-Matter of the Study. 

The world is full of phenomena which men call religious. 
They are partly subjective and partly objective. They include 
personal beliefs, emotions, acts ; social customs, institutions, 
rites. They are at least as old as recorded history, as universal 
as the sense of moral obligation. Of all elements of human 
experience they are the deepest and the highest, the most inter- 
esting, the most sacred. As such they claim the studious atten- 
tion of all thoughtful persons, whether they hold to one religion 
or to another, or to none. 

To define religious phenomena more narrowly we must define 
religion. This in its highest sense is the normal bearing of men 
in and toward God, the ground of all finite existence. In an 
empirical and wider sense it includes all actual or historic en- 
deavors after such a bearing, however far short of the ideal they 
may have come. It is in this wider sense that the term must 
ordinarily be used in the present course. Accordingly, the 
phenomena of religion must be understood to include all mani- 
festations of man's religious nature, however high and however 
low. Wherever there is an attempted personal bearing over 
against what is believed to be divine, there some of the phe- 
nomena of rehgion will be found. 

Surveying more closely the religious phenomena of the world 
as thus defined, we shall quickly discover that they are not un- 
related and connectionless, a mere chaos of isolated facts, unor- 
ganized and unorganizable. On the contrary, they tend to 
group, and do group themselves into distinct systems of reli- 
gious belief and life. So far as these are systems of belief 



6 The Religions of the World 

merely, they constitute what may be called theoretical or specu 
lative systems; so far, on the other hand, as they are systems of 
tribal, or national, or voluntarily associated life, they may be 
styled historic or concrete. 

The chief of the former or speculative class are Monotheism, 
Dualism, Polytheism, Atheism, and Pantheism. 

The chief of the historic or concrete systems now existing in 
the world are : 

I. The religions of the barbaric tribes and peoples. 

II. The religions of the more important of the partly civilized 
nations ; such as the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Thibetans, 
Burmese, and Siamese. Here are found Confucianism, Shinto- 
ism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in its various national and secta- 
rian forms. 

III. That rightly named World-religion, which beginning with 
man's beginning, and unfolding as the divine purposes succes- 
sively unfold, reaches its first culmination and interpretation in 
the theanthropic person and teachings and world-redeeming 
work of Jesus Christ. This is the religion of the most highly civi- 
lized peoples of the globe. Of this world-old World- religion 
modern Judaism is simply the survival of an outgrown form, 
Islamism an abormal reversionary variation due to inadequate 
instruction and leadership at the time when the gospel first 
reached Arabia. 

The question, Whence these precise religions, and the succes- 
sive forms through which they have passed, deserves attention. 
The problem is a profound one, for the forces by whose action 
and interaction particular religious systems are produced, main- 
tained and perpetually modified, are among the most subtile and 
complex known to human investigation. 

Five fundamental facts, however, go far towards explaining 
in a general way the origin and the successive modifications of 
all particular religions. 

First. Men universally and it would seem instinctively mani- 
fest a religious activity of some kind. 

Second. Under the partly conscious, partly unconscious influ- 
ence of reason, this religious activity ever tends to come into 
some degree of comformity with a strictly consistent life-theory 



and the World-Relisrion. 



<i> 



and world-theory of some sort, — it may be monotheistic, dua- 
listic, polytheistic, pantheistic, or even atheistic. Hence arise 
speculative or abstract religions systems corresponding to these 
various conceptions of man and of the universe. 

Third. Like other universal activities the religious is affected 
by social influences. Of necessity it enters into the social life 
of bodies of men, constitutes a factor in the development of that 
life, conditions in great measure its quality and is in turn con- 
ditioned by it. Hence originate concrete or historic systems of 
religion, reflecting and in some measure determining the genius 
of a particular people or of a particular religious society. 

Fourth. The inter-relation between the life and the religion 
of a man, or of an aggregate of men, is so intricate and vital 
that the rehgion cannot be changed without changing the life, 
nor on the other hand, can the life be changed without chang- 
ing the religion. Hence all profound changes in the pursuits, 
tastes, or states of culture of a people are preceded, accom- 
panied, or followed by noteworthy modifications, if not by real 
transformations, of religious belief and life. 

FiftJi. The theistic world-view cannot maintain itself, or even 
complete itself, without postulating on the part of the World- 
Author and World-Administrator a self-revealing and self-com- 
municating activity, world-wide and world-old, like that histori- 
cally exemplified in the World-religion. In the view of every 
true theist, therefore, this divine activity is the most fundamental 
and significant factor in every religion^ as manifest in the decay 
and fall of systems as in their rise and growth. Man's search 
after God is but the consequence of God's antecedent and inces- 
sant quest of man. 

In concluding this preliminary glance at the subject-matter of 
our study, it is well to remind ourselves of the immense number 
and variety of facts and principles included therein. They are 
found not in one department of human life merely, but in all. 
Illustrations of the power and influence of religion in the do- 
mestic sphere could be drawn from the history of every people. 
So, also, from social and civil life ; from the realm of education ; 
from the domain of art ; from the field of Uterature and from 
the great world of popular customs. With such matter volumes 



8 The Religions of the World 

upon volumes could be filled. Traverse whatever department of 
thought and action we will, we encounter the manifest and mul- 
tiform phenomena of religion. Whatever religion itself may 
be, something natural or supernatural ; a dream, or a reality ; 
a lunacy, or a sanity, — its universal presence and power in 
humanity and in humanity's history compel attention, and de- 
mand investigation according to the strictest and most thorough 
methods of scientific study. 



CHAPTER II. 

The Admissibility of the Scientific Treatment of the 
Religious Phenomena of the World. 

The practicability and propriety of investigating and setting 
farth the religious phenomena of the world in accordance with 
what is called the scientific method would at first thought seem 
to be as much beyond question as the like procedure in the case 
of any phenomena of a mental, social, or ethical character. But 
since the admissibility of the application of the scientific method 
to religion has been repeatedly and earnestly challenged, and 
this from very different points of view, it becomes necessary 
here at the very threshold of the study to examine and test the 
objections urged. But, first, what is meant by the term, the 
scientific method } 

As here used it designates and includes : 

Firsty That procedure by which the mind carefully, critically 
and repeatedly observes a group of phenomena, and so comes to 
know their exact character and normal order of succession. 

Second, That procedure by which the mind reaches verifiable 
or otherwise rationally satisfactory conclusions touching the 
cause or causes of said phenomena, the conditions under which, 
and the laws according to which, these causes act. 

Thii'd, That procedure by which the mind reaches verifiable 
or otherwise rationally satisfactory conclusions touching the 
connections and correlations of these phenomena with others, 



and the World-Religio7t. 9 

and of their causes with other causes, and the true purpose and 
significance of said correlations. 

It has often been said that the scientific method has no pre- 
suppositions. How untrue is this declaration, the most super- 
ficial glance at any adequate definition of it suffices to show. 
Even in the hands of a materialist the scientific method rests 
upon at least three immense postulates : First, The absolute 
validity of the normal processes 'of human intelligence. Second^ 
The absolute and unvarying constancy of natural law. Thirds 
The rationality of the universe of being and of its workings as a 
whole. Deprive him of any one of these fundamental assump- 
tions and at once any and every employment of the scientific 
method becomes impossible. 

Such being the nature and the presuppositions of this method 
in all its applications, it is evident that objections to its applica- 
tion to religion might antecedently be expected from several 
parties : 

First. From all those who question the validity of human 
knowledge in general. In other words the skeptical school of 
philosophy properly so called (Pyrrhonists). 

Second. From those who admitting the validity of all knowl- 
edge acquired by sense-perception, question or deny the possi- 
bility of any valid knowledge of the supersensuous. 

Third. From all those who, admitting the possibility of a 
valid knowledge of supersensuous objects and realities in the 
sphere of the finite, — as, for example, in human consciousness, 
— question or deny the possibility of any valid knowledge of 
that unconditioned presupposition, ground, and unity demanded 
by the finite for its own explanation. 

To all of the above classes of objectors it is proper and suffi- 
cient to say, that their quarrel is with the scientific method it- 
self, or with its first assumption, — not with the application of it 
to religious phenomena as such. 

But beyond the above mentioned objectors stand two other 
classes of persons who question or deny the admissibility of a 
scientific treatment of religion. 

The first do this on the ground that in its essential nature 
religion transcends knowledge. It is an experience which in 



lO The Religions of the World 

strictest literalness passeth all understanding. In its full and 
normal actualization it so fills and dominates the whole con- 
sciousness of its subject that the observant and critical and ra- 
tiocinative activities and attitudes of the mind are necessarily 
and entirely excluded. The moment the soul attempts the sci- 
entific explanation of its religious experiences, those experiences 
are already of necessity at an end, and there is nothing left for 
observation. The most consistent and thoroughgoing repre- 
sentatives of this view maintain that the idea of God is innate, 
that in the intuitional faculties we possess an organ for immedi- 
ate and conscious fellowship with God, and that the exercise of 
reason, using this term as a designation of the discursive faculty, 
instead of helping us toward a knowledge of God and the true 
life in Him, only hinders and distracts. 

The second class hold that normal religion necessarily pre* 
supposes a supernatural and personal communication of the 
mind and will of Him who is the true object of religious thought 
and worship, in other words, an authoritative didactic revelation 
from God. They affirm that no study of the religious phe- 
nomena of the world, or of the phenomena of nature, could ever 
give us information as to God's nature, or character, or purposes 
concerning us, or as to our duties toward Him. To supply this 
lack of light He has made and duly authenticated a plain revela- 
tion upon all these subjects; and possessing this, every attempt 
on our part to seek religious knowledge apart from it, or to ad- 
just its teachings to those of fallible human reason, or even to 
support its doctrines by deductions from religions which it dis- 
owns and condemns, is at once an impertinence and a folly. To 
these persons the only legitimate use of reason in religion is 
reverently and unquestioningly to accept X\\^ prima facie teach- 
ing of the authoritative Didactic Revelation. 

To both classes it might be replied, that granting their re- 
spective tenets, or either one of them, we have already therein 
a most important and fundamental contribution to a philosophy 
of religion, and that every philosophy of religion necessarily 
presupposes and rests upon a scientific study of the phenomena 
of religion. Indeed, without such a study, and a logical, use of 
the results of such a study, neither the mystic can show the 



and the World- Religion. 1 1 

transcendence of religion in its relation to knowledge, nor the 
revelationist the existence and exclusive claims of his revelation. 
The characteristic view of each is, therefore, inconsistent with 
itself and self-destructive. 

Again, to both of these parties it may be replied, that they 
misapprehend and misrepresent the scientific method and its as- 
sumptions. Both treat the question as if in the application of 
this method to the phenomena of religion there was no place for 
the exercise of any faculty other than the logical understanding. 
Especially does the mystic forget that that transcendent con- 
sciousness of divine communion which he so exalts, is itself a 
mode of knowing as truly as of feeling, and in fact, according to 
his own principles, the highest, most immediate and perfect of 
all modes. In like manner the sti :kler for revelation forgets 
that no object or being is capable of being known save as it re- 
veals or self-manifests itself to the cognizing subject ; so that 
this necessity for self-manifestation ^'s no more predicable of 
God than it is of man, or of those objects of which natural 
science treats. Both, therefore, misap )rehend or ignore one or 
more of the primary postulates of the S':ientific method itself. 

Finally, it may be remarked, that b )th parties mistake the 
true force and significance of the very considerations which 
they urge against the application of the scientific method to re- 
ligious phenomena. These consideratio.is, instead of producing 
in us a despair of attaining true conceptions of religion and of 
its psychological and social laws and i>elations, ought only to 
remind us of the transcendent excellence and compass of that 
knowledge to whose acquisition we are ; ummoned, and of the 
encouragement we ought to find in the essentially self-manifes- 
tive character of its Object. If beyond tliis they remind us of 
the disproportion of our present powers to such high tasks as 
those here contemplated, we may well reassure ourselves with 
the thought that all human science has its bounds and limita- 
tions, and that in the field of religious investigation, if anywhere, 
human infirmity may hope for divine guidance and help toward 
the truth. 



12 The Religions of the World 



CHAPTER III. 

The Three Procedures and the Resulting Groups of 

Sciences. 

In the scientific treatment of the religious phenomena of the 
world the three essential modes of procedure are : firsty\.\\^ His- 
toric ; secondy the Systematic ; and third, the Philosophic. 

Whoever pursues the first undertakes to set forth the genetic 
or chronological order of these phenomena in the origin and 
development of particular religious systems and movements, or in 
the history of religion universally considered. Whoever pur- 
sues the second undertakes to set forth religious phenomena in 
their logical relations as cmstituent and contemporary elements 
of systems more or less ir elusive. oVhoever pursues the third 
undertakes from a carefu^ study of the facts of religion and of 
its history to ascertain aid to set forth the essential nature of 
religion, its origin, its psychological and other presuppositions, 
the laws of its individurl and social development, its subjective 
and objective validity. 

The man who adopts :he historic procedure may limit himself 
to single religions ; or ^e may trace comparatively or otherwise 
the rise and history of developments common to a group of re- 
ligions ; or finally, he n ay seek to include the whole field. In 
the first case, he elaborates histories of single religions ; in the 
second, comparative o." other histories of wider religious move- 
ments or of peculiarities of such movements; in the third, a 
universal history of eligion. 

In like manner the man who adopts the systematic procedure 
may undertake to deal with the phenomena presented by a 
single religious system ; or with those pertaining to a class of 
religions ; or, finally, with those which are common to all. In 
the first case, he gives us a systematic exposition of a particular 
religion ; in the second, a comparative theology of the chosen 
group ; in the third, a universal theology, a science of religion 
universally considered. 



and the World-Religion. 13 

All sciences, therefore, which relate to the phenomena of re- 
ligion may be classified as follows : 

I. The Historic Group. 

1. Histories of particular Religions. 

2. Comparative Histories of wider religious movements, 

or of special features common to a class of religions. 

3. The Universal History of Religion, or the History of 

Religion universally considered. 
n. The Systematic Group. 

1. Particular Theologies. E. g.. Christian, Mohammedan, 

etc., etc. 

2. Comparative Theologies. E. g.. The Comparative The- 

ology of the Indo-German Group of Religions. 

3. Universal Theology, or the systematic exposition of 

religion universally considered. 
HI. The Philosophical Group. 

1. The Philosophy of the Object of Religion. 

2. The Philosophy of the Subject of Religion. 

3. The Philosophy of the past, present, and future Inter- 

relations of the Subject and Object of Religion. 

From the foregoing conspectus, it is evident that the term, 
the " Science of Religion," can no longer be used without great 
vagueness and ambiguity. Once investigators thought to con- 
struct a *' Science of Life," but before they had completed a 
preliminary survey of the data, they found they had built up 
the whole hierarchy of what are now called the biological sci- 
ences. So half a thousand years ago there was a body of syste- 
matized facts and truths that might might well enough have 
been styled the Science of Christianity; since that time, how- 
ever, the progress of scholarship has substituted for that one 
unitary presentation about a score of recognized theological sci- 
ences, each highly organized and reasonably comprehensive. In 
like manner the so-called Science of Religion is fast giving place, 
not merely to a group of new religious sciences, but even to a 
group made up of sub-groups, as just shown. Indeed, the term, 
the Science of Religion, as used since its introduction some 
years ago, has never been quite free from ambiguity. Some- 



14 The Religions of the World 

times it has sharply excluded almost everything pertaining to 
the philosophy of religion, while in other cases it has been used 
as wholly inclusive of that department of the study. German 
writers have done no better. Religionswissenschaft (the Science 
of Religion), and Religio7isphilosophie (the Philosophy of Re- 
ligion), have been alternately differentiated and alternately in- 
terchanged, until no reader feels the least assurance of the 
meaning in a given case until he examines the context. Even 
Religionsgeschichte (the History of Religion) is so vaguely used 
that the translator of De la Saussaye's "Manual of the History 
of Religion " gives as the English equivalent, " Science of Re- 
ligion." Neither title well fits the contents of the book, but, as 
between the two, that chosen by the author would seem the more 
appropriate. Following such examples, Professor Menzies not 
only uses the term. History of Religion, as synonymous with 
Science of Religion, but even seems to defend such a confusing 
usage. (History of Religion, Lond. and N. Y., 1895, pp. 2, 3.) 
The above grouping of the new sciences now rapidly coming 
to recognition, further shows the infelicitous character of another 
term often applied to this field of study, to wit, "Comparative 
Religion," or, worse yet, "Comparative Religions." This origi- 
nated by contraction from the phrase, the Comparative Study of 
Religions. But the proper and recognized name for the organ- 
ized scientific results obtained by the comparative study of re- 
ligions is Comparative Theology. This is a well-defined, and, 
for its proper purpose, very convenient term. Comparative Re- 
ligion is not. There is such a thing as a comparative study of 
languages, but to call the thence resulting science, " Compara- 
tive Language," would be to suggest to the uninitiated that the 
thing spoken of was a subordinate section of Rhetoric, and that 
the next ensuing section would treat of "Superlative Language.'' 
Comparative Philology is not likely to be superseded by any 
such ambiguous and indefinable term as Comparative Language, 
and there is even less propriety in designating the total historic, 
systematic and philosophic study of religious phenomena by a 
term wellnigh inconceivable in any literal signification, partial 
in scope, and misleading in its one methodological connotation. 



and the World-Religion. 15 



CHAPTER IV. 

Sources for the Scientific Study of the Religious 
Phenomena of the World. 

The Sources from which the student of religions chiefly draws 
his information may be divided into two general classes : 
I. The Proximate. 

II. The Remoter. 

The former consists mainly of the treatises which authors 
more or less competent have written in elucidation of the differ- 
ent religions and of their history. Of the latter, the following 
are more important: 

1. The epigraphical and monumental. 

2. The hagiographical, or that found in the sacred books of 
different religions. 

3. The legendary and mythological. 

4. The incidental or collateral. 

In many cases several or all of these sources are available. 
Thus, for example, if we wish to investigate the Egyptian con- 
ception of a future life, we have (i) monumental inscriptions 
and mural decorations which illustrate it. We have (2) in the 
Funereal Ritual, or so-called Book of the Dead, an extremely 
valuable hagiographical source of information. Then (3) there 
are important myths and legends to be examined ; and (4) as 
incidental or collateral sources, the statements of early Greek 
travelers who visited the country, etc., etc. 

On the other hand, in many cases we are shut up to a single 
source, and often to one the least definite and trustworthy of all. 
Thus, for example, if our problem were to ascertain what views 
of the future life were held by the ancient Massagetae, we 
should be restricted to the fourth variety of remoter sources, if 
indeed we could find any whatsoever. 

All these sources must be used with the utmost care if one 
would not be led astray. Where more than one is available, 
the yield of each should be supplemented, corrected, or con- 



1 6 The Religions of the World 

firmed, as the case may be, by the yield of each of the others. 
In this task, unwearying patience, rare historic insight, and the 
utmost breadth of scholarship are exigently demanded. 

Especially difficult is the utilizing of the mythological sources. 
For while some myths embody historic facts in forms not too 
poetical to be beyond trustworthy interpretation, these consti- 
tute but the smallest fraction of the mass which must be studied. 
In this mass are the innumerable myths of mere spontaneous 
story-telling ; those of an imaginative etymology ; those of a 
fanciful natural philosophy and natural history ; those of a more 
or less conscious didactic aim ; those of a distinctly conscious 
affectation of archaic ideas and modes of expression. To detect 
the exact character of each, or even its exact value or its value- 
lessness to the student of religions, is one of the most arduous 
if not the most hopeless of tasks. 

Both of the above-named general classes of sources are con- 
stantly becoming richer and more copious. The progress of 
archaeological exploration in ancient seats of civilization ; the 
advance of general and special ethnography ; the constantly in- 
creasing attention to Oriental and other literatures and to com- 
parative folk-lore, are steadily enlarging and otherwise improv- 
ing each variety of the remoter sources ; while living writers 
availing themselves of this new knowledge are producing more 
and more trustworthy treatises entitled to rank as enlargements 
and improvements of those sources of our study which we have 
styled the proximate. 



CHAPTER V. 

Personal Equipment for the Study of Religions. 

In order that a student of the world's religions may be quali- 
fied to use with any freedom and thoroughness even those 
sources which in the last chapter we styled proximate, it is in- 
dispensable that he have a good working knowledge of at least 
five languages: the Greek, Latin, German, French, and English. 
The literatures of all these languages should be readily acces- 



and the World-Religion, ly 

sible for each and every investigation he may have occasion to 
make. 

For the full utilizing of the remoter sources no human knowl- 
edge is superfluous. The requisites here are so vast that no 
one man can dream of acquiring them all. In some of these 
investigations the key to a right solution of the problem is as 
likely as not to be found only in some quite out-of-the-way field 
of knowledge, such as ancient heraldry, astrology, alchemy, me- 
trology. Lenormarit made his rare knowledge and skill in nu- 
mismatics of great service to the study of religion. In the study 
of ancient mythologies, a knowledge of seals, intaglios, and 
cameos is of great importance ; in fine, the full employment of 
our sources calls for the patient co-operation of vast numbers of 
specialists in every department of learning. Even with this co- 
operation, the time can never come when we can be confident 
that the monuments, and traditions, and languages of antiquity 
have no new secret to yield up to skilful investigation. 

If these remarks be true it is plain that there can be no exact 
enumeration of the particular sciences which are, or which may 
be preliminary to the study of religions. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Auxiliary Sciences. 

Much the same must be said of any attempt to name the 
sciences properly auxiliary to our study. There is no science 
which in one way or another is not tributary and helpful to this 
line of investigation. As there is nothing in the universe which 
does not come within the circle of religious ideas and interests, 
there can be no body of scientific truths destitute of significance 
for the study of religions. If, however, one inquires for a list of 
those sciences from whose progress our study in its present 
state has most to hope, at least, the following would have to be 
included : 

I. General Anthropology and Ethnology. 
II. Psychology, Personal and Ethnic (Volkerpsycologie). 



1 8 The Religions of the World 

III. The Science of Language, and Comparative Philology. 

IV. The History of Human Culture, and the Comparative 

Study of Civilizations. 

V. Moral Philosophy, and Comparative Ethics. 

VI. Political Philosophy, and Comparative Jurisprudence. 
VII. Esthetics, and the Comparative History of Art. 
VIII. Universal History and the Philosophy of History. 
IX. Geography of Races, Civilizations and Religions. 
X. General Sociology. 

The relations which these various branches sustain to each 
other, and the exact ground which each should cover, are not as 
yet in all cases well defined ; but the progress of any one of 
them, however defined, is helpful to the Study of Religions. 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Attractiveness, the Utility, and the Perils of 
THE Study of Religions. 

To the thoughtful mind whatever is human has imperishable 
interest and attraction. Be it but a bit of drifting folk-lore, be 
it but a barbarous rite, be it a peculiarity of speech, of govern- 
ment or of Social organization, be it an achievement, an aspira- 
tion, a tradition, a myth, a parable, a discovery, an invention ; be 
it barely a fossil relic of some far-off geologic period, — if it is 
only human, it is at once invested with a fascination altogether 
unlike that attaching to anything not expressive of personal life. 
But of all human aspirations the religious is the highest; of all 
human traditions those of religion are the oldest ; of all human 
institutions those of religion are the most vital ; of all human 
aims and achievements in art, in literature, in music, in educa- 
tion those of religion are the divinest. In the study of religion, 
therefore, the charm which the human has for the humanist and 
for humanity is at its maximum. 

But beyond and above the human lies the superhuman. And 
it is to the realm of the superhuman ; to the heavens and hells 
of humanity; to the worlds invisible and worlds yet to come ; to 



and the World-Religion. 19 

orders of beings immaterial ; to disembodied spirits, angels, 
archangels, rulers of celestial spheres, divinities in human and 
other forms, demigods, to the Supreme and Eternal One, who 
alone can say, "I am and by me all subsists," — it is to this 
realm that the study of religions introduces us. Hence, as long 
as the hidden future either attracts or terrifies men, as long as 
the mystery of the unseen piques the curiosity of human ques- 
tioners, as long as the superhuman origin, ground and destina- 
tion of the world and of humanity have fascination for human 
thought, so long must the study of the phenomena of religion 
have fascinating interest for men. 

Again, at the present time the study has the charm of won- 
derful freshness and novelty. In our generation a greater prog- 
ress has been made in this field of investigation than in any 
preceding one. The vast literatures of the great ethnic religions 
of Asia are for the first time undergoing exploration. The un- 
earthed cities and shrines of ancient empires are daily yielding 
precious secrets. Through the gates of unlocked hieroglyphics 
we are conducted into ancient worlds and civilizations whose 
very memory had perished. Meantime the pioneers of the 
Christian missions and of commerce are penetrating into the in- 
most recesses of the last retreats of barbarism, and disclosing 
for comparative study the superstitions and the customs and the 
cults of those respecting whom recorded history could give us 
no knowledge. Till now the materials for an all-comprehending 
and therefore truly scientific study of religion have been lacking. 
Even at present its vast sources are but just opened. All the 
greater, of course, are the zeal, the enthusiasm, the success of 
the workers who are constantly bringing new materials to light. 
All the greater, too, is the zest with which constructive scholar- 
ship is giving itself to the task of mastering the vast results of 
individual specialists in archaeology, philology, ethnology, etc., 
and of organizing them into the new special, comparative and 
universal sciences of religion, which as yet have scarcely been 
named and defined. 

Of the utility of the study of one's own religion, whichever it 
may be, it is not necessary to speak. Every intelligent and 
thoughtful man feels it to be of practical importance to know the 



20 The Religions of the World 

truth respecting the origin and history of the religious commun- 
ity with which by birth or public profession he is associated. 
Without intelligent personal convictions respecting the propriety 
of the claims which his religion makes upon him, he cannot 
satisfactorily meet those claims. But without a study of the 
system, and of the duties which it inculcates, and of the grounds 
on which it bases those duties, he cannot have the requisite 
personal convictions. Hence, among every people and sect, a 
study of the inherited religion is esteemed essential to an intelli- 
gent and well-supported practice of the duties it inculcates. 

As respects ourselves who are representatives of the World- 
religion in its Christian stage, the advantages accruing from 
the study of the non-Christian systems along with our own, and 
from the study of all religious phenomena historically, system- 
atically and philosophically, are almost numberless. A few of 
the more obvious and direct are the following : 

1. Such study must tend to guard one against that narrow- 
ness and uncharitableness of judgment, that caste-pride, and 
self-righteousness, into which all ignorant religionists are sure 
to fall. 

2. More than almost any study, it must throw light upon the 
nature of man, upon his relation to other beings, upon the law and 
end and meaning of history, upon the relations of the finite to the 
infinite. In fine, there is scarcely a problem of anthropology, 
ethnology, sociology, cosmology, theology, or ontology, toward 
whose solution the thorough and scientific investigation of the 
religious phenomena of the world will not contribute. 

3. The great literary and artistic creations of the world are 
so inseparably connected with religious ideas, inspirations and 
achievements, that, without familiarity with these, the Iliad and 
the Mahabharata, the Serapaeum and the Parthenon, Apollo 
Belvedere, and the Oratorio of the Messiah, are entirely unintel- 
ligible. The study of religion and of its history is, therefore, a 
fundamental and essential element in any truly liberal and polite 
education. 

4. If Christianity is mistaken and arrogant in its claims and 
expectations, if it is only one of many religions all of merely 
human origin, it surely is in the interest of truth and genuine 



and the World-Religion. 2t 

progress that this fact be shown. On the other hand, if Chris- 
tianity furnishes the only key to human history and destiny, the 
sooner and the wider and the more convincingly this can be 
proven the better. But for the investigating and arguing of this 
question on either side a wide knowledge of the religions of the 
world and of their history has now become indispensable. 

5. Finally, to those who, by settled convictions of its truth, 
and by public profession of its life, and by official authoriza- 
tion of its professors, are public expounders and teachers and 
defenders of Christianity, a wide and constantly increasing 
acquaintance with the religious phenomena of the world is of 
incalculable advantage ; partly by affording a world of varied 
and apposite illustration such as a public teacher needs ; partly 
by the new light which it sheds upon Bible history and Bible 
doctrine ; partly by reason of the ability it gives to expose the 
ignorance of dabblers and babblers ; and, finally, by reason of 
the fresh and ever more perfect insight which it gives into the 
essence of the true religion, and into the identity of ideal Chris- 
tianity with ideal Religion. 

But while so great utility must be claimed for our study, it 
cannot be denied that to the beginner it presents somewhat of 
peril. In every case, the student approaches the investigation 
with religious, if not also with speculative, and national, and racial 
prepossessions. So much more intimate and sympathetic has 
been his relation to one of the religions of the world than to the 
others that it becomes one of the most difficult of tasks for him, 
in studying other systems, to place himself in every case at the 
point of view of those who have been born and reared in them. 
And just in proportion to the difficulty of doing this, is there 
danger lest he do less than justice to the alien systems, even if 
he does not do more than justice to his own. 

Again, every marked widening of intellectual vision caused 
by new knowledge necessitates new adjustments of knowledge 
to faith and faith to knowledge. And every attempt to effect a 
thus necessitated new adjustment, involves something of peril 
to the faith, whether that faith be true or false. In cases where 
it is false, the increase of knowledge must, slowly it may be, yet 
surely, destroy it. But even where faith is essentially true and 



22 The Religions of the World 

well founded, it may be sorely imperiled, and, in particular 
individuals, is doubtless often destroyed by the force of that 
natural reaction which the mind experiences on discovering the 
inadequacy of early and outgrown expressions of its faith. For 
example, when the Christian student comes for the first time to 
investigate, in a scientific spirit, the different religions of the 
world, to compare and contrast the Christian with other religious 
systems, to face, for the first time the impressive thought that 
even upon his own principles the providential government of 
the world must in some way have included and utilized all ethnic 
religions ; that therefore, somehow, they must all have had a 
place and a significance in the divine plan, his mind is apt to 
experience a kind of bewilderment. The new horizon is so much 
broader than the accustomed one that he is in danger of entirely 
losing sight of the old and familiar landmarks. Upon a naturally 
narrow, conceited and ill-balanced mind, the effect, in many 
cases, is to induce a reactionary contempt for its earlier faith 
and a total rejection of the Christian world-view. Upon a 
broader, deeper and more penetrating intelligence the effect is 
quite the reverse. The height and depth, and length and 
breadth, of God's kingdom are seen in a light never dreamed of 
before. Now for the first time does Christianity become the 
true World-religion, the explanation of all history, the prophecy 
of a yet to be consummated ethnic and cosmic unity. 



BOOK FIRST. 



The Religious Phenomena of the World Historically 

Considered. 



INTRODUCTION. 
Division I. History of Particular Religions. 

Division II. History of Developments common to several 
Particular Religions. 

Division III. History of Developments common to all Re- 
ligions. 



INTRODUCTION. 



In chapter third of the General Introduction we saw that the 
historic method of investigation and representation might be 
applied : 

1. To particular religions, ethnic or other ; or 

2. To historic features, tendencies or developments common 
to a class of religions; or 

3. To the rehgious life of mankind as a whole. 

The first of these applications gives us the History of Religions 
individually considered. The second the History of Religions 
comparatively considered. The third the History of Religion uni- 
versally considered, or in its crowning form the History of the 
World-religion. 

In each of these Hnes of work we have as yet only tentative and unsatis- 
factory beginnings. In the opening section of his History of Rehgion (Lon- 
don and Boston, 1877), Professor Tiele has defined the first and last of the 
above applications, but somewhat strangely omitted any recognition of the 
second. Professor J. C. Moffat of Princeton, in his Comparative History of 
Religions (New York, 1871), nowhere defines what he conceives to be the 
proper aim or field of the branch of history whose name he employs. The 
work to which he applies it is a contribution, not so much to the Compara- 
tive History of Religions properly so called, as to the History of Religion 
universally considered. Even our latest so-styled " History of Religion," 
that by Professor Menzies, makes no distinction whatever between the his- 
toric, the systematic, and the philosophic procedures in this line of study. 

Historical investigation can promise no useful result unless 
based upon a correct idea of history itself, and especially of its 
essential factors and laws. For example, if human freedom be 
a reality, human developments must be radically different from 
all developments below the human sphere. Each class must 
be interpreted in the light of that difference. Again, if super- 



26 The Religions of the World 

human or subhuman personalities exist, and have at any time, 
or in any place, or in any degree, affected human thought, or 
feeling, or action, these extra-human personalities constitute 
a factor in the development of the race, — a factor without 
reference to which the race's history can never be rightly con- 
ceived of or represented. One of the first and fundamental 
duties, therefore, of any author professing to set forth the his- 
tory of a religion, or of a movement belonging to several re- 
ligions, or of religion universally considered, is to define his 
standpoint with respect to man's freedom or unfreedom, and 
with respect to the adequacy or inadequacy of human agency 
taken alone to account for the phenomena reported. Further- 
more, having clearly and frankly defined it, it is of course his 
duty to remain true to it throughout his entire construction and 
representation of the facts considered. 

The scientific and philosophic vindication of the standpoint 
adopted by any historian of religion must be found, partly in 
the degree of perfection with which it corresponds to the facts 
in hand, and partly in its relation to the outcome of the Philoso- 
phy of Religion in general. So far as a priori considerations 
are concerned, if the materialist or agnostic claims that by the 
logical law of parsimony we are estopped from postulating su- 
perhuman factors in any domain of human history until it has 
been demonstrated beyond dispute that the human ones cannot 
possibly explain the facts, the theist, and even the pantheist, 
may, on the other hand, with equal propriety, affirm, that to 
approach the study of religions with an a priori denial of the 
existence and possible influence of superhuman beings is as 
unreasonable as it would be to approach the study of the flora 
of the earth with a sturdy determination not to admit of the 
existence and possible influence of superfloral light and air and 
floriculturists. 

As all human history is a process of constructive or destructive 
development, the history of religions and of religion partakes 
of this character. However abrupt, radical and revolutionary 
some of the changes of the religious world may at first sight ap- 
pear, there is never an entire break with the past. As the re- 
ligions life of the man, the community, the race goes forward, new 



and the World-Religion. 27 

factors are continually taking their places in it ; new social and 
spiritual and other environments are constantly coming to affect 
it ; yet it is the same man, the same people, the same race whose 
life is thus proceeding from phase to phase. In the subject of 
each religious development resides a continuity of being. In its 
life, as in all vital processes, the immediate past conditions the 
possibihties of the present ; the present, the possibilities of the 
immediate future. 

In order rightly to conceive of any evolution, care must be 
taken to obtain a correct conception, first, of the Subject ; and, 
secondly, of the Environment. 

This being the case, it is evident that in developments in any 
wise related to man, it is hardly possible to give too much 
attention to the element of personality in both subject and en- 
vironment. The development of bodily strength and aptitude 
attained by the athlete can never be understood without partic- 
ular attention to the personal purpose and personal resolution 
by which he has held himself to faithful and prolonged training. 
So the evolution of a thorn-bearing tree into a pear-bearing one 
requires, for its right understanding, a knowledge of the power of 
a skillful grafter ; in other words, requires that the influence of 
a personal, and to it supernatural environment, shall be taken 
into account. Hence, in studying a religious evolution, equal 
care must be taken, on the one hand, that the personal power 
of self-determination belonging to each man be not overlooked, 
and, on the other hand, that due account be taken of the influ- 
ences that may come from the other personal powers, human or 
extra-human, which help to make up each man's environment. 

In investigating and setting forth the history of religion uni- 
versally considered, nothing can be more unscientific than to 
ignore the chronological order of the different particular relig- 
ions as they were actually related to the life of the world, sub- 
stituting therefor a purely arbitrary one, based upon supposed 
degrees of comparative simplicity, or comparative complexness, 
or like principles of classification. Tide's arrangement of the 
different systems, according to which the student is introduced 
to the religion of the American Cherokees and Esquimaux be- 
fore he is to the religions of ancient Chaldaea, Egypt or Phoenicia ; 



28 The Religions of the World 

and to German mythology before he is to the Greek, is a con- 
spicuous example of the fault here alluded to. In the work of 
Professor Menzies, the order is open to the same criticism. 
Islam is presented before Christianity, and primitive Semitic 
religion long after the religion of the Assyrians. 

The question as to the earliest form of religion is at the 
present day so complicated with other questions, that the proper 
place for its discussion is in the Philosophy of Religion, where 
in due time it will come before us. Suffice it here to say 
that, according to the oldest traditions of the oldest peoples, 
not less than according to the sacred records of the Hebrew, 
Mohammedan, and Christian world, mankind were in the begin- 
ning blessed with divine fellowship and favor, and only by sin 
fell a prey to demoniacal and destructive powers. The slowly 
proceeding self-revelation of sinful humanity over against the 
slowly proceeding self revelation of humanity's loving and pa- 
tient Creator, sufficiently explains the long and dark and even 
tragic history that ensued until the arrival of the all-interpreting 
Day of Pentecost. The considerations ordinarily adduced by 
naturalistic writers to disprove a primeval fall and consequent 
degeneracy of man and a loss of primeval religion, would equally 
disprove the fall of all the great empires and art schools of 
antiquity. They would render incredible even the teachings of 
geolog)^ touching the flora of the Tertiary age. The latest 
of these weak argumentations may be seen in Menzies' ** His- 
tory of Religion," p. 23. On the other side, see the closing 
chapters of "• Paradise Found." 



DIVISION FIRST. 

The History of Particular Religions. 

The most natural order in which to treat of the history of 
the leading religions of the past and present is according to the 
three following groups : — 

I. The religions known to the Ancient World. 
II. Those known to the Mediaeval World. 



and the World- Religion. 29 

III. Those with which modern discovery and exploration have 
made us acquainted. 

It is a special recommendation of this order that, better than 
any other, it enables the student fruitfully to combine the study 
of particular religions, and of groups of religions historically 
related, with the study of the history of religion universally 
considered. This will become more and more evident the 
farther the investigator advances. We may therefore proceed 
to the question, What are the important religions in each of 
these groups, and to what point has the scientific study of 
their history attained t 

Part I. History of the Principal Religions known to the 

Ancient World. 

Here belong : (i) The religion of the ancient Babylonians and 
Assyrians, including that of their Akkado-Sumirian or Proto-Chal- 
daean predecessors. (2) The religion of the ancient Egyptians. 
(3) The religion of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Canaanites 
and PreTslamic Arabians. (4) The religion of the ancient Per- 
sians and Medo-Persians. (5) The religion of the Pelasgians 
and Greeks. (6) The religion of the Etruscans and Romans. 
(7) The religion which, at the close of the period, vitally and 
permanently supplanted all the foregoing, to wit, the World- 
religion. 

The foregoing include all the important religions which were 
known to the ancient world, and which, by their growths and 
decays, and by their mutual historic actions and reactions, made 
the ancient world religiously what it was. The religions of 
China and India are quite possibly as old as those of Greece and 
Rome, but not having come in any influential sense, if at all, to 
the knowledge of the vitally associated nations of the ancient 
world, they do not belong in our present group Their history 
can best be studied in connection with the third period, — the 
period in which they first truly begin to bring their long accumu- 
lating contribution to universal history into effective relations 
with the total life of humanity. 

The ethnic religions of the above group have this in common : 



30 The Religions of the World 

they are all styled polytheistic. In entering upon the study of 
polytheisms, however, two things should never be forgotten. 
First : A belief in the existence of such limited and originated 
beings as the so-called gods of the polytheist is not in the least 
incompatible with a genuine belief in an unlimited and unorigi- 
nated Being back of and anterior to all these, a " God of gods," 
as Plato says — the real and Eternal Source of gods and of men. 
Polytheism, therefore, and monotheism are no more mutually 
exclusive at bottom than are monotheism and a belief in arch- 
angels. In fact, the most elaborate system of totemism is com- 
patible with a fundamentally monotheistic belief whenever — as 
is usually the case — the totemistic tribe conceives of its ances- 
tral animal or plant as having originally received its being and 
destination from the hand of the '* Great Spirit." Second: All 
peoples who explain the multiplicity of their "gods" by theo- 
gonic processes of emanation or generation, must be assumed 
to have started with a prehistoric, or else self-postulated, primi- 
tive monotheism. No theogony is complete and satisfying until 
it conducts the mind back to a primeval and unengendered Pro- 
genitor of the total divine family. It is not strange, therefore, 
that in every historic polytheism we find traces of monotheism, 
prehistoric, or speculative, or both.^ In the Egyptian system, 
the monotheistic and polytheistic elements are so inextricably 
blended that the ablest Egyptologists are unable to agree as to 
whether the one class or the other should be considered the 
predominating. In the religion of Zoroaster the dominance of 
the monotheistic idea is quite generally affirmed. 

Even if the oldest ethnic religions presented no traces of an 
earlier monotheism it would not disprove the Biblical account of 
antediluvian religion. It might only prove that in the long 
period elapsing between the Deluge and the date of the oldest 
records of profane history, the widely scattered descendants of 
Noah either totally lost the knowledge of the one true God, or 
else placed the worship of their national and tribal divinities to 

1 Compare Chas. Loring Brace, The Unknown God ; or Inspiration among the Pre-Christian 
Races. N. Y. i89o[3493 67,] and E. M. Caillard, Progressive Revelation, London 1895. — After al! his 
studies of savage ideas and life, even Mr. A. Lang closes a.volume with these impressive words : " Even 
the lowest savages, in hours of awe and need, lift their hands and their thoughts to their Father and 
to ours, who is not far from any one of us." — Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol, i. [3497.71]. 



and the World-Religion. 31 

such a degree in the foreground, that in our exceedingly meagre 
sources this worship seems the only one known and practised. 

In proceeding with our study the aim of the student should 
be to acquire as clear an idea as possible of the nature, extent 
and present state of the sources for the study of each of the 
above enumerated religions. Also information as to the religion 
itself ; the phases through which it passed ; its significance for 
the history of human culture and for the World-religion. 

More particular instruction as to means and methods will be 
given orally and by assigned questions and topics in the class- 
room, following the order of the Chapters below. 

CHAPTER I. 
History of the Religion of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians. 

CHAPTER H. 
History of the Religion of the ancient Egyptians. 

CHAPTER HI. 
History of the Religion of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Canaanites, 
and Pre-Islamic Arabians. 

CHAPTER IV. 
History of the Religion of the ancient Persians and Medo-Persians. 

CHAPTER V. 
History of the Religion of the Pelasgians and Greeks. 

CHAPTER VI. 
History of the Religion of the Etruscans and Romans. 

CHAPTER VII. 
History of the Religion which at the close of the period vitally and per- 
manently supplanted all the foregoing, to wit, the World-religion. 

This last named religion is so singularly unlike the other con- 
stituents of the group that before entering upon the study of its 
history during the period the student may well pause to note its 
characteristic quality. 

It should be observed, then, that while among the eldest 
peoples of the ancient world we find a vague and shadowy prim- 
itive monotheism gradually giving place in historic times to in- 



32 The Religions of the World 

creasingly polytheistic ethnic religions, and these in turn oft- 
times menaced and sometimes undermined by later speculative, 
moral and religious movements, or by political revolutions, there 
is one line of history in which we see that primitive monotheism 
preserved, enriched and perfected from age to age. This re- 
markable line is that up which our own religion traces its gene- 
alogy. 

At first sight it might seem as if this unique and most remark- 
able of all historic developments in the religious sphere might 
more appropriately and logically be subdivided or resolved into 
three distinct religious systems, and classified thus : 

1. Primeval Religion, or the rude original germ of all the an- 
cient religions. 

2. Judaism, as the ethnic or national system of the Jews. 

3. Christianity as a beneficent schismatic and sectarian revolt 
from the narrowness and exclusiveness of the national Jewish 
faith. Those who recognize no exceptional or superhuman ele- 
ment in the entire evolution do thus proceed. 

A deeper study of the whole subject, however, will manifest 
the impropriety of such a classification, and the scientific neces- 
sity of conceding to this ancient World -religion a character and 
historic unity of its own. Its earliest Pre-Hebraic form was in- 
deed, in a certain sense, the germ of all the most ancient relig- 
ions of the world, but its Hebrew form was not ethnic in any 
proper sense. Although to the Jews a national religion, it was 
not national in the same sense as were the Gentile religions. 
Even in the books of Moses, Jehovah declared that the whole 
earth was His (Ex. xix, 5). The first of the Ten Command- 
ments implied the same doctrine. The Jews regarded them- 
selves not as the monopolists, but rather as the temporary 
custodians of the true faith. They were trustees, guardians, 
executors, holding a precious legacy for the benefit of younger 
brothers not yet of age. They desired the divine blessing for 
themselves as a means of blessing for the whole world. " God 
be merciful unto us, and bless us, that Thy way may be know^n 
upon earth. Thy saving health to all nations." They regarded 
their religion as universal in its nature and destination. From 
the very first, it was understood, believed, and gloried in, that in 



and the World-Religion. 33 

Abraham's seed all nations of the earth were to be blessed. 
Thus was the Jewish religion not ethnic, local, limited, but, 
from the outset, self-consciously and professedly universal in its 
nature and possibilities. 

Nor was this universality merely ideal ; it was a trait which 
powerfully affected the life. From the days when Moses said to 
Hobab, "Come with us and we will do thee good " (Num. x, 29), 
to the time when Jesus declared to his countrymen, *' Ye com- 
pass land and sea to make one proselyte," this zeal to bring all 
nations, in God's time and way, into the enjoyment of the priv- 
ileges of their own religious covenant and communion, was a sig- 
nal characteristic of the Hebrew people. In Rahab and Ruth 
we see how, under the divine administration of human events, 
these converts from the Gentile nations could be promoted even 
to a place in the royal line of promise. In the Psalms, in Isaiah, 
Daniel, and the other prophets, we can see how confidently, yea, 
how longingly, the nation looked forward to the time when the 
knowledge of the glory of their Jehovah should cover the whole 
earth ; when there would be no further need of proselyting 
teachers, no man needing to say to his brother. Know thou 
Jehovah, — all knowing Him already, from the least unto the 
greatest. How perfectly opposed to the spirit of every ancient 
ethnic religion. With them it was high treason to betray to 
neighboring peoples the sacred books, dogmas, or rites of the 
ancestral faith. King Tarquinius of Rome caused Valerius 
Soranus, a duumvir, to be sewed up in a sack and thrown into 
the sea for the crime of showing to Petronius, a Sabine, a book 
relating to the Roman religion. 

So far, indeed, was Judaism from being an ethnic system, that 
it would be far more correct and scientific to style it the one 
implacable historic antagonist of all ancient ethnicisms. Age 
after age it stood a perpetual protest against them all. Even 
when overthrown and enslaved by surrounding powers, this 
strange people still confidently foretold the fall and failure of 
all these proud religions and states. Its prophets ridiculed, de- 
nounced, and doomed to destruction the mightiest deities of 
Egypt and Babylon, Phoenicia and Syria. The darker the pres- 
ent became, the brighter and nearer seemed to them the " day 



34 The Religions of the World 

of Jehovah," when He should arise to shake terribly the earth, 
when the idols he should utterly abolish. 

In like manner the analogy of Christianity to the religious 
systems and sects which have originated by way of reaction 
against ethnic religions, is only of the most superficial and out- 
ward character. It has no basis in the real essence of Christian- 
ity. Reactionary sects and their systems arise, not from the 
ripening and perfecting of the essential principles and tenden- 
cies of the parent system, as does Christianity, but from the 
opposition of principles and tendencies antagonistic to the tra- 
ditional religion. Christianity is not a new religion, it is merely 
a completer form of an old one — the oldest of all. If we are to 
call it a system distinct from the Jewish, it is a consummating, 
not a destroying, system. Jesus declared, " I came not to de- 
stroy, but to fulfil." Judaism, through all its history, expected 
to flower out into a new dispensation upon the coming of the 
Promised One. Reactionary religions and sects reject, abhor, 
and demonize the gods of ancestral worship, but Christians still 
worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Reactionary 
systems reject and destroy the teachings and sacred books of the 
parent system ; Christianity, on the contrary, reverently retains 
and hallows all revelations and scriptures of the Old Dispensa- 
tion. The founders of reactionary sects and systems promulgate 
new conditions of salvation ; in Christianity, on the contrary, 
the apostle usually counted the most radical and innovating of 
all, expressly identifies the saving faith of the Christian with 
the saving faith of Abraham (Gal. iii, 7-29; Rom. iv). In a 
word, Christianity is to Judaism what the substance is to the 
forecast shadow (Col. ii, 17 ; Heb. x, i) ; what a message from 
God's Son is, compared with a message from forerunning, God- 
sent messengers (Matt, xxi, 33-41 ; Heb. i, i ; Heb. ii, 4) ; what 
adult sonship is to the precedent stage of tutelage and pupilage 
(Gal. iv, 1-7) ; what the heavenly Jerusalem is to the earthly 
(Gal. iv, 24-31 ; Heb. xii, 18-23) ; what the full corn in the ear 
is to the ear as yet unfilled (Mark iv, 26-29). These similes all 
go to show not only that there is a principle of unity underlying 
the successive dispensations of sacred history, but also that this 
unity is positive, organic, and institutional. With the progress 



and the World- Religion, 35 

of revelation, divine and human, the form has changed, but the 
essence has remained unchanged. This essence, according to 
its own representation, is the kingdom and life of God in en- 
lightened, renewed, and obedient souls. 

In yet another sense this World-religion is entitled to its 
name. It is the perpetual heir of the world's divinest treasures 
in every land. It embodies and expresses the power which is 
slowly accomplishing the divine purpose of human history. In 
Abraham it receives and carries forth from Babylonia the old- 
est and most sacred traditions of the antediluvian world. In 
Moses it takes possession of all the wisdom of the Egyptians. 
At Jerusalem it employs the best art of the world, Phoenicia's, 
to build and adorn a nobler temple than ever Phoenicia saw. 
Even in captivity it makes the proudest Persian conqueror its 
servant. It borrows for its sacred books the matchless tongue 
of Hellas ; for schoolmasters for its children, the princely 
thinkers of Athens ; for the better equipment of its free-born 
Apostle, the citizenship of Rome. Its field is the world. Con- 
scious of a divine origin and destination, everywhere at home, 
it, and it alone, has power to utilize all other systems, and hav- 
ing vitally appropriated whatever is vital in them, permanently 
to supplant them all. 

Part II. — History of the Principal Religions known to the 

MedicBval World. 

Since the fall of the Ancient World, its heir, the World- 
religion, has more than ever had custody and guidance of hu- 
man culture. For some centuries its leading instrument for 
this service in the secular sphere was the scepter of the Roman 
Empire. In this Christianized dominion more than anywhere 
else, and more than ever before, the prehistorically dispersed 
human race came to a consciousness of its inter-gentile and su- 
per-gentile unity. The old ethnic ideals fell, never to rise 
again. Provincialism in religion, as in manners and modes of 
thought, lost caste. Polytheism ceased to be suited to the cul- 
tivated ; it was fit only for rustic villagers — Pagani. Purely 
ethnic philosophies and religions like ethnic autochthonisms. 



36 The Religions of the World 

needed no learned refutation ; they simply found themselves left 
behind in the forward movement of Humanity. Under a 
redemptive experience of the All-Fatherhood of God, men of 
the most diverse tribes and tongues quickly discerned and ac- 
knowledged the All-Brotherhood of Man. A new philosophy of 
the world and of its history burst into expression in Augustine's 
Civitas Dei, then hastened forward to fuller and even more im- 
mortal utterance in Dante's Divina Commedia. 

With the progress of the endogenous growth of the World- 
religion in the new world-culture during this period, every well 
recognized survival of the elder ethnic systems disappeared. 
In the progress of its exogenous growth, on the frontiers of the 
monotheistic world, new ethnic cults were discovered, but none 
of them equalled either in maturity, or in grade of culture, the 
great ethnic religions of the elder world. In their turn these 
fell, and at the close of the second period of Universal History, 
as at the close of the first, the World-religion was found the 
heir and successor to all that had been. 

In the order of the following chapters the new forms of 
ethnicism belonging to the period are successively to be studied. 
In all cases the data are very defective; but here, as in similar 
cases, an important part of the profit of historical study consists 
in the discovery of the bounds of knowledge. 

CHAPTER I. 

History of re-established Zoroastrianism in the new, kingdom of Persia under 
the Sassanidae. 

CHAPTER n. 

History of the Religion of the Celtic Tribes. 

CHAPTER III. 
History of the Religion of the Teutonic Tribes. 

CHAPTER IV. 
History of the Religion of the Slavic Tribes. 

CHAPTER V. 
History of the Religion of the West-Mongolians. 



and the World-Religion. 37 

CHAPTER VI. 

Continuation of the History of the World-religion, — the monotheism which 
in Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan form, at the end of the period, 
had vitally and permanently supplanted all the foregoing. 

The above order of treatment best answers to the historic 
movement as a whole. It also has the advantage of presenting 
Islamism in its true historic relations on the one hand to the 
ethnic systems (see above Chapter III of Part First), and on the 
other to Judaism and Christianity. The complete view of the 
system in these latter relationships can best be gained under 
Chapter IV. of Part First of Division Second of the present 
Book, and under Part Third of Division First of Book Second. 

In this connection the following among many similar works will be found 
instructive : — 

Uhlhorn, Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism. — Merivale, Conver- 
sion of the Roman Empire ; Conversion of the Northern Nations. — Maclear, 
on the same subjects. — E. G. Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Govern- 
ment. — Milman, History of Latin Christianity. — C. L. Bruce, Gesta 
Christi. — Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. — Lessing, 
Nathan . 

The best life of Mohammed is Muir's, which also includes a brief history 
of Islam; 4 vols., London, 1858-1860 [*K.207.8]. There is also a small 
popular compendium in one volume. Sale's translation of the Koran has 
held a place of honor since 1734 [3484.31] . RodwelPs [3485.110], giving 
the Suras in chronological order, was published in 1862. E. H. Palmer's, 
2 vols., 1880 [3024.58, vols. 6 and 9]. Lane's Selections from the Koran 
is a valuable compilation, and reached a second edition in 1879 [3027.54]. 
The most valuable Commentary upon the Koran is that by E. N. Wherry, 
4 vols., London, 1885 [3026.55]. An extremely valuable encyclopaedic 
work was published in 1885 by Hughes, entitled A Dictionary of Islam 
[*3482.57]. See, also, his Notes on Mohammedanism [3488.102]. Stanley 
Lane Poole edited a little work in 1882, under the title. The Speeches and 
Table Talk of Mohammed. The best general text-book, in small compass, 
is The Faith of Islam, by Rev. E. Sell, London, 1882 [5481.55]. Useful 
and inexpensive are the following : Muir, The Koran, its Composition and 
Teaching, London, 1879 [5489a. 68] ; Stobart, Islam and its Founder, 
London, 1877 [5489a. 58]. W. St. Clair-Tisdall, The Religion of the Cres- 
cent, 1895. On the progress of Mohammedanism, see Gibbon's Decline and 
Fall, Chapter L. and onward. Also, Ockley's History of the Saracens. 
Also, Muir, Caliphate [3044.114]. For a thorough study of contempo- 
raneous Islamism, the following work is almost indispensable: D'Ohsson, 
Tableau de TEmpire Ottoman. A partial English translation [5491.51]. 



38 The Religio7is of the World 

In the study of this subordinate type of the World-religion, 
two points are of more than ordinary scientific as well as prac- 
tical interest. First, the constant testimony borne by the Koran 
to the divine origin, authority and truth of the Jewish and 
Christian Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. This is 
very learnedly and extendedly treated by Sir William Muir in 
his little work, The Koran, its Composition and Teaching, and 
the Testimony it bears to the Holy Scriptures. In this, citing 
the original Arabic texts, he examines critically each of the one 
hundred and thirty-one passages of the Koran referring to the 
Bible, or quoting from it. He thus finds and shows that Mo- 
hammed uniformly assumes the existence and currency of the 
Old and New Testaments in his time, that he calls them the 
Word of God, that he attests their inspiration and authority, 
and inculcates upon his followers obedience to them. 

The second point of peculiar interest is, that while Islamism 
claims for Mohammed the honor of being the latest of a series 
of twenty-five great prophets who have formed a holy succession 
from Adam downward, and while it gives special honor to Adam, 
Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, as chief of these 
twenty-five, and as divinely appointed heads of successive di- 
vine dispensations, it yet remains a curious fact that of all these 
greater and lesser prophets, Jesus is the only one to whom the 
Koran imputes no sin, the only one who never needed the par- 
doning grace of God. That Mohammed was a sinner, and again 
and again needed the forgiveness of sins, is abundantly taught 
in such passages as Sura iv, 104, 105 ; xl, 21 ; xlviii, 1-3 : xciii, 
6, 7; ex, 3. 

It is also an interesting fact that all Mohammedans are Sec- 
ond Adventists in an approximately Christian sense of this term, 
and that it is their universal belief that we are now living in the 
last times. Their Mahdi may appear at any hour. 

In their Eschatology, all three forms of the World-religion 
strikingly converge. Paul foresaw the disappearance of the anti- 
thesis between Israelite and Christian (Rem. xi, 13-26; Eph. 
ii, 1 1-22) ; yea, even the disappearance of that twixt Moslem and 
Christian and Jew, — in the day when, in the name of Jesus, 
every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, 



and the World-Religion, 39 

and things under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus 
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Part III. History of the Principal Religions of the World i7i 

Modern Times. 

Here belong all those successively disclosed by the progress 
of modern exploration before, during, and since the circumnav- 
igation of the globe. They claim the attention of the student 
in the following order, as that in which they claimed the atten- 
tion of the Christian world : — 

I. The religions of the West-Central and South African 

Tribes. 
II. The religions of the American Indians. 

III. The religions of the Pacific Islanders. 

IV. The religions of the East India aborigines and Hindus. 
V. The religions of ihe aboriginal and present populations 

of Farther India, and of the Islands of the Indian 
Ocean. 
VI. The religions of the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. 
VII. The religions of the North and Central Asiatic Nomads. 
VIII. The World-religion, which, chiefly in its Christian 
form, has, during the period, more or less completely supplanted 
the foregoing in South Africa, in North and South America, in 
the chief Islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans ; which has 
taken political control of Africa, Northern and Southern Asia, 
Australia, New Zealand, the whole of the New World, and which 
is steadily establishing itself in every unchristianized corner of 
the globe. 

The above order is chronological as far as possible. 
In the case of the first, second, third, fifth, and seventh of 
the above-mentioned religions, it is plainly impossible to trace 
their rise and historic development. The data are too entirely 
lacking. On the other hand, such religions as those of the Hin- 
dus and Chinese present historic developments full of interest 
and importance. See " Specimen Studies." 



40 The Religions of the World 



DIVISION SECOND. 

The History of Developments Common to several Par- 
ticular Religions. 

The lines of historic investigation presenting themselves 
under this head are almost numberless. For our present pro- 
paedeutic purpose the more important of them are the following: 

Part I. History of the Rise and Development of Racial, Nation- 
al, Tribal or other types or varieties fro'}n a Religion origi- 
nally single. 

I. The Proto-Semitic Religion in its development into the 

historic systems of Arabia, Assyria, Phoenicia, etc. 
II. The Pre-Vedic Proto-Aryan Religion in its development 
into the various historic systems of the Indo-Germanic 
peoples. 

III. Original Buddhism in its development into the Ceylonese, 

Burmese, Chinese, Thibetan and other varieties. 

IV. Primitive Monotheism in its development into the exist- 

ing systems and sects. 

Part II. History of the Absorption of lesser and more local Reli- 
gions into greater and more prevalent Ones. 
Examples. 

I. In the history of ancient Babylonia. 
II. In the history of ancient Egypt. 

III. In the history of the Persian Empire. 

IV. In the history of the Roman Empire. 
V. In the history of Buddhism. 

VI. In the history of the World-religion. 

Part III. History of the Rise and Development of variotis Cults 
and Worships common to several Particular Religions. 

Here belong such as the following : 
I. Ancestor and Hero Worship. 
II. Light, Fire, Sun, Moon, and Star Worship. 



and the World-Religion. 41 

III. Worship of terrestrial objects (Zoolatry, Phytolatry, Den- 

drolatry, etc.). 
IV. Worship of spirits Shamanistically conceived of by their 
worshipers ; etc., etc. 

Part IV. History of the Rise and Development of Particular 
Rites, Usages, or Institutions common to several Religions. 

Here are meant such as : 

I. Animal Sacrifice, and Rehgious Offerings in general. 
II. Divination in its various forms. 

III. Religious tonsure, circumcision, and other bodily muti- 

lations from religious motives. Human Sacrifice. 

IV. Religious Festivals; Orgies; Pilgrimages to Holy Places, 

etc. 
V. Priesthoods ; and other Religious Orders. 
VI. Temple Building ; Sacred Art ; etc. 

Part V. History of the Rise and Progress of various Speculative 
Movements common to several Religions. 

Here are meant such movements as : 
I. That toward Speculative Theism. 
II, That toward Speculative Atheism. 

III. That toward Pantheism. 

IV. That toward Dualism. 
V. That toward Optimism. 

VI. That toward Pessimism. 
VII. That toward Casualism. 
VIII. That toward Fatalism. 

Part VI. History of the Rise and Progress of Various Practical 
Tende7icies common to Different Religions. 

Here belong such tendencies and movements as : 
I. That toward lifeless doctrinal Dogmatism. 
II. That toward revolutionary religious Scepticism. 

III. That toward religious Mysticism. 

IV. That toward hierarchical Ceremonialism. 



42 The Religions of the World 

V. That toward personal and cenobitic Asceticism. 
VI. That toward aggressive proselytizing or persecuting 
Fanaticism. 



DIVISION THIRD. 

The History of Matters common to all Religions, or 
THE History of Religion Universally Considered. 

The imperfection of our sources renders it as yet impossible 
to elaborate in a really satisfactory manner any considerable 
period or even branch of the universal history of religion. 

The following among other conceivable lines of investigation 
suggest in a rough way the interest and the immense extent of 
the field : 

I. A synchronological history of the rise and development 
of the religions of the world, including a conspectus of 
their present state geographically, ethnologically, and 
statistically considered. 
II. History of the actions and reactions of religion upon 
each other, and the effects thereof upon the history of 
religion universally considered. 

III. History of the religious delusions and impostures. 

IV. History of religion viewed as a disuniting and as a reunit- 

ing factor in the ethnical and national life of Humanity. 

V. History of the religious conceptions and life of mankind 

as a whole, set forth from the standpoint of naturalism. 

VI. History of the religious conceptions and life of mankind 

set forth from the standpoint of the World-religion. 

At this point the History of Religions becomes a Philosophy 
of Religion, for a true history of the world's religious phe- 
nomena includes of necessity an explanation of the methods and 
reasons in and on account of which they have become what they 
are, and this of course is a Philosophy of Religion-historically- 
considered. 



BOOK SECOND. 



The Religious Phenomena of the World Systematically 

Considered. 



(Hierography : General and Special.) 



INTRODUCTION. 

Division I. Systematic Exposition of Particular Religions. 

Division II. Systematic Exposition of Matters Common to 
Several Particular Religions, 

Division III. Systematic Exposition of Matters Common to 

All Religions. 



INTRODUCTION. 



In the preceding Book we have had to do with religious 
developments as processes, here we have to do with their results. 
The difference is well illustrated by that existing between the 
sciences called the History of Christian Doctrine, and Didactic 
Theology. While the cultivator of the one studies the genesis 
and modifications of a particular process in the life of the 
Christian Church, the cultivator of the other studies the accom- 
plished result of the same process at a particular point of time. 
The same relation exists on a broader field between the History 
of the Surface of the Earth, and Geography. In each case the 
one of the related sciences shows us the origin and progress of 
a historic movement; the other the organized historic result. 
The one is profluent in character, the other static. 

In approaching the systematic treatment of religions and of 
the religious phenomena of the world as a whole, one of the first 
questions encountered is that of division, classification and order 
of treatment. On this important subject but little has yet been 
written. Writers on the Philosophy of Religion have proposed 
a variety of philosophic divisions, and have sometimes attempted 
to classify the facts, historical and actual, in accordance there- 
with. Were the systematic exposition of religion in all its forms 
yet possible, these proposals and attempts would be suggestive 
and valuable ; but to the student of particular religions and 
groups of religions the classifications offered seem arbitrary in 
the extreme. Even as schemes for the division and classification 
of religious phenomena universally considered, their variety, 
and especially their mutual inconsistencies and oppositions, 
amounting in some cases to mutual self-cancellation, show that 
they have all sprung, not from a descriptive or scientifically 
expository aim, but rather from a desire to make history con- 
form to the writer's preconceived philosophical principles and 
theories. 



46 The Religions of the World 

A classification of religions purely for the purpose of system- 
atic exposition should be primarily based on the historic order 
of their rise and culmination. Ancient religions should come 
before modern ones. This is only following the natural scien- 
tific order. So in those cases where a continuous religious 
development has successively culminated in systems quite 
distinct from each other, these successive systems should also 
be expounded in the same order in which they appear. Thus 
in the case of Hindu religion, the Vedic system should be 
expounded before the Brahmanical, the Brahmanical before the 
conglomerate system now prevalent. So in the monotheistic 
line of development, Patriarchal Religion should precede the 
Mosaism of Solomon's kingdom ; this should precede the Juda- 
ism prevalent in the time of Christ's birth ; this in turn precede 
primitive Christianity, primitive Christianity every later form 
of the World-religion. The reasons for such adherence to the 
historical order are too obvious to need enumeration. 

As to contemporary religions, ancient or modern, several 
principles of classification are possible, each with its own peculiar 
advantages. For example, the national religion of the ancient 
Germans was contemporary with a vast number of other religious 
systems, but if in classifying the religions of those ages we follow 
the principle of ethnological affinity, and accordingly study and 
expound the Germanic system in connection with the related 
mythologies and rites of other Indo-European peoples, Hindu, 
Persian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Slav, etc., our task will be greatly 
simplified and the result more truly scientific. On the other 
hand, there are often found groups of contemporary religions 
where the ethnological principle of classification is entirely 
inapplicable. The peoples among whom they are found are so 
mixed as to race-character that the attempt to keep race-pecu- 
liarities in view would only introduce confusion. The ancient 
Babylonians are such a people; the Egyptians another; even 
the Chinese in the broad sense another. Indeed, so rare are 
the instances of religious systems embodying and expressing 
what may be called race-ideas and race-tendencies that some 
eminent writers deny their existence altogether, and afifirm that 
all historic forms of religion should be expounded in their rela- 



and the World-Religion. 47 

tion to nations — none of them in their imagined relation to 
races. If this view be thought one-sided and extreme, it at 
least has the merit of reminding us of the cases where the 
national or political principle of classification may be more 
advantageously employed than anywhere else, viz., in the group- 
ing of the contemporary religions of ethnographically mixed 
peoples. 

Max Miiller, in the second and third of his lectures introductory to the 
Science of Religion [3438.58], argues for a classification of all religions on 
the basis of language. It was a natural suggestion for a comparative philo- 
logist to make, but as an exclusive principle of classification it is entirely im- 
practicable. So far as the principle is coincident with the ethnological one, 
it is entitled to the subordinate place and use that we have above illustrated, 
but nothing more. 



DIVISION FIRST. 

Particular Religions Systematically Treated. 

For the purpose of a systematic treatment, the grouping of 
the leading religions of the world according to the order pro- 
posed for their historical study in Book I, Part I, would pre- 
sent many advantages, and should, perhaps, have the preference 
over all others. Should one desire to vary it, however, it 
might be found convenient to group all religions in the fol- 
lowing classes : — 

I. The Extinct Ethnic. 
II. The Yet Surviving Ethnic. 

III. The Monotheistic Systems. 

Adopting this classification, the present Division includes 
three several Parts. 

Part I. Systematic Expositioii of the Chief Extinct Ethnic 

Religions of the World. 

The exposition should include not only their conceptions or 
doctrines, but also their religious institutions, rites, etc. Here 
belong, among others, the religions : — 

I. Of the Ancient Chaldaeo-Assyrians. 



48 The Religions of the World 

II. Of the Ancient Egyptians. 

III. Of the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and Arabians. 

IV. Of the Greeks. 
V. Of the Romans. 

VI. Of the Celts. 
VII. Of the Teutons. 
VIII. Of the Slavs. 
IX. Of the Mexicans. 
X. Of the Peruvians. 

In few if any of the above have we reason for believing that 
the religious development culminated in successive systems so 
distinct and different from each other as to call for separate de- 
scriptive treatment. 

Part II. Systematic Exposition of the Chief Living Ethnic 

Religions of the World. 

Here belong, among others, the religions : — 

I. Of the Hindus. 

11. Of the more or less Buddhistic populations of Eastern 
Asia. 

III. Of the Parsees. 

IV. Of the Barbarian World. 

Part III. Systematic Exposition of the Chief Successive Forms 

of the World-Religion. 

These are, of course : 

I. The Hebrew Form (Ancient Judaism). 

II. The Apostolic (Primitive Christianity). 

HI. The Oriental Christian Form (Greek Church). 
IV. The Arabian, Judaeo-Christian (Islam). 

V. The Latin Christian (Romanism). 

VI. The Teutonic Christian (Protestantism). 
VII. The Incoming Millennial World-religion. 



and the World-Religion. 49 



DIVISION SECOND. 

Systematic Treatment of Matters Common to Several 

Religions. 

The comparative study of any group of religions, whether 
naturally and historically related or arbitrarily selected, discloses 
certain likenesses or unlikenesses in their characteristic con- 
ceptions, beliefs, and usages. These resemblances and differ- 
ences are always interesting and often highly instructive, espe- 
cially as contributions toward a true Philosophy of Religion and 
a true Philosophy of History. Systematically presented, they 
constitute Comparative Theology, properly so called. 

Part I. Systematic Exposition of Conceptions Comnioft to Vari- 
ous Religions. 

These conceptions may be most lucidly presented in two par- 
allel classes in parallel columns, the first of which relates to 
monotheistic, the second to non-monotheistic religions : 

I. Their conceptions of I. Their Theogonies and 
God. Theologies. 

II. Their conceptions of II. Their Cosmogonies and 
the Creation of the World. Cosmologies. 

III. Their conceptions of III. Ethnic Pneumatology 
Angels and Men. (Metempsychosis, etc.). 

IV. Conception of the one IV. Ethnic views of Moral 
divine Law, and of Sin. Obligation and of Evil. 

V. Divinely-sent Teachers V. Self-attained Seership, 
and Prophets. Buddhahood, etc. 

VI. Their conceptions of VI. Their conception of 
Salvation from Sin. Deliverance from Evil. 

VII. Their conceptions of VII. Their conception of 
Death and of the Future. Death and of the Future. 

Part II. Systematic Exposition of the Duties inculcated and 
Moral Life Actually Achieved in Various Religions. 

I. The Duties of Piety. 
II. The Duties of Parents and Children. 



50 TJie Religions of the World 

III. The Duties of Husbands and Wives. 

IV. The Duties of Masters and Servants. 
V. The Duties of Rulers and Subjects. 

VI. The Duties of Man to Beast. 
VII. The Duties of Man to Man. 

Part III. Systematic Exposition of the Laws and Institutional 
Life of Various Religions. 

I. Forms of Organization and Administration. 
II. Laws touching Initiation, Discipline, etc. 
', III. Laws touching Rites of an ordinary or periodic character. 
IV. Laws touching Rites of an extraordinary or unique 
character. 
V. Laws relating to the Priesthoods exclusively. 
VI. General Codes of religious laws ; Sacred Books ; relation 
of the Individual to the Governing Power in different 
religions, etc. 



DIVISION THIRD. 



Systematic Treatment of Matters Common to All 

Religions. 

In the present condition of knowledge a satisfactory systematic 
treatment of the matters common to all religions is impossible. 
The divisions below are intended only as suggestions of what 
would be desirable if practicable. 

Part I. Conceptions Common to All Religions, 

I. Conceptions of the Divine. 
II. Conceptions of the Origin of Things. 

III. Conceptions of the Origin of Man. 

IV. Conceptions of the Origin of Evil. 

V. Conceptions of Deliverance from Evil. 
VI. Conceptions of the Highest Good. 



and the World-Religion. 51 

Part II. Sentiments Common to All Religions. 

I. The sentiment of Dependence upon somewhat extra- 
human. 
II. The sentiment of Obligation toward that extra-human 
somewhat. 

III. The sentiment of moral Self-approval with respect to 

the object or objects of religion. 

IV. The sentiment of moral Self-reprobation in the same 

respect. 
V. The sentiment of religious hope and fear ; trust and dis- 
trust ; love and hate ; etc., etc. 

Part III. Practices Common to All Religions, 

I. Practices expressive predominantly of religious Self-sur- 
render. 
II. Practices expressive predominantly of religious Self-asser- 
tion. 

It will be observed that, in the foregoing Division, as before 
in the corresponding Division III of Book I, we make a transi- 
tion to the Philosophy of Religion. There we saw the History 
of Religious Phenomena universally considered merge itself into 
the Philosophy of Religion historically considered. Here, by a 
like inherent necessity, the Systematic Exposition of Religion- 
universally-considered merges and loses itself in the Philosophy 
of Religion-systematically-considered. Thus both the historic 
and the systematic methods prepare the way for and conduct us 
into the philosophic. 



BOOK THIRD. 



The Religious Phenomena of the World Philosophically 

Considered. 



(The Philosophy of Religion.) 



INTRODUCTION. 



Division I. Philosophy of the Object of Religion and of His 
Manward Self-revelation. 

Division II. Philosophy of the Subject of Religion and of 
His Godward Self-revelation. 

Division III. Philosophy of the Inter-relations of Subject and 
Object in the Vital Movement of the World- 
religion. 



INTRODUCTION/ 



An introduction to the Philosophy of Religion should include 
at least the following topics : — 

I. The Aim and Possibility of a Philosophy of Religion. 
II. The Relation of the Philosophy of Religion to other 
branches of Philosophy. 

III. The Relation of the Philosophy of Rehgion to the His- 

tory and to the Systematic Exposition of Religions. 

IV. History, Literature and present State of the Philosophy 

of Religion. 
V. Different fundamental Standpoints and Postulates of dif- 
ferent Philosophies of Religion. 
VI. Plan and Method of treatment demanded by the present 
state of religious knowledge and by present currents of 
thought and life. 

A word respecting each must take the place of fuller exposi- 
tion. 

Ad primum. We may define the Philosophy of Religion as 
that synthesis of the Philosophy of God and of the Philosophy 
of Man and of the Philosophy of their natural and personal re- 
lations in which all facts relative to the attitude and bearing of 
each to the other find their rational explanation. Its aim is to 
harmonize and unify, and thus to rectify and more perfectly in- 
terpret, and also finally to verify, men's conceptions respecting 

1 Our most elaborate work in the English language entitled an Introduction of the Philosophy of 
of Religion, is that by Principal John Caird, of Glasgow University, published 1880. This, however, 
is rather an outline of a Philosophy of Religion, than an Introduction to it. Thus it first vindicates 
the possibility and propriety of a philosophic handling of Religion (Chapters I-lII); then treats of 
the Necessity of Religion ; the Proofs of the Existence of God ; of the Religious Consciousness ; of the 
Inadequacy of Religious Knowledge in the Unscientific Form; of the Transition to the Specxilative 
Idea of Religion ; of the Religious Life and Relation of Morality to Religion ; and, finally, of the re- 
lation of the Philosophy to the History of Religion (Chapters IV-X). Under none of the above heads 
is the branch of learning to which the author proposes to introduce us defined as to matter, aim, 
method, or its relation to other branches of human investigation. On these points, however, more 
than any other the beginner needs to be enlightened. 



56 The Religions of the World 

the Subject, Object and Essence of Religion. Its possibility is 
absolute, so far as facts and phenomena are concerned ; relative 
and limited, however, when considered with reference to our 
limited knowledge and limited powers. 

Ad secnndimt. The Philosophy of Religion, being the syn- 
thesis of the philosophy of the infinite and of the finite, neces- 
sarily stands at the summit of all philosophic disciplines, crown- 
ing and unifying the whole. It is the queen of all, and to her 
all are directly and logically tributary. 

Ad tertium. The relation of the Philosophy of Religion to the 
History and to the Systematic Exposition of Religion has been 
briefly but perhaps sufficiently hinted in the closing remarks 
under Book I and Book II [Pp. 42 and 51]. 

Ad qitartum. The history of the Philosophy of Religion is 
well presented in the partially translated work of Piinjer 
[7602.60]. The student may profitably consult Otto Pfleiderer, 
Philosophy of Religion, Vols. I and II [36ooa.2i]. 

Ad qiiintum. The Philosophy of Religion can be treated from 
as many fundamentally different subjective standpoints as any 
other branch of philosophy. Hence we must be prepared to see 
it treated by the most varied and antagonistic writers, each from 
his own peculiar point of view : agnostic, sensationalistic, ideal- 
istic, sceptic, mystic, eclectic, etc., etc. And of this, religion 
must not complain ; it is only subject to the same fortune as be- 
falls all subjects of human thought. 

But besides these subjective standpoints there are also certain 
objective postulates which lead to treatments of the matter 
fundamentally diverse. Such postulates are those of material- 
istic monism, idealistic monism, undifferentiated monism, those 
of various forms of dualism, etc. 

Among all these various standpoints and postulates it is the 
duty of every writer upon the Philosophy of Religion, first, to 
make an intelligent and conscientious choice; then, having 
chosen, to define and vindicate his choice, and remain logically 
true to it. 

Ad sextum. On the proper divisions and methods of a 
Philosophy of Religion little has as yet been written. Nor is it 
easy to set forth any single distribution of the matter or any 



and the World-Religion. 57 

single method for its treatment that can claim superiority in 
all respects over others. For since every related group of 
religious phenomena, however small and however isolated, 
demands at the hands of the interpreter of religion a rational 
explanation, it is evident that this department of study can be 
divided into an almost unlimited number of constituent branches, 
and that these are susceptible of almost any number of varying 
arrangements, combinations, and treatments, according to one's 
point of view and according to one's aim in the total construction. 

Perhaps these possible variations in plan and method may best be illus- 
trated by glancing at the order of the topics in a few actual works upon this 
subject. We will take four works representing respectively America, Scotland, 
England, and Germany. 

The first is the Philosophy of Religion, by ex- President John Bascom, New 
York, 1876, the first American work, perhaps, published under this title. It 
includes an Introduction chiefly on the Relation of Philosophy to Science ; 
then fifteen chapters on the following topics: I. A Statement of Mental 
Powers. II. The Being of Matter and Mind. III. The Being of God. IV. 
The Attributes of God. V. Nature. VI. Man. VII. Immortality. VIII. 
Revelation. IX. Miracles. X. Inspiration. XI. Interpretation. XII. Primi- 
tive Facts: Sin and the Divine Law. XIII. Constructive Facts: Trinity, 
Christ, His Divinity, Work, Holy Spirit, Sanctification, The Church. XIV. 
Future Life. XV. Lines and Conditions of Progress. 

As an English work we will take the Philosophy of Religion by J. D. 
Morell, London, 1849. This consists of twelve chapters as follows: I. On 
the Faculties of the Human Mind. II. On the Distinction between the logical 
and the intuitional Consciousness. III. On the peculiar Essence of Religion. 
IV. On the peculiar Essence of Christianity. V. On Revelation. VI. On 
Inspiration. VII. On Christian Theology. VIII. On the Analysis of Popu- 
lar Theology. IX. On Fellowship. X. On Certitude. XI. On the Signi- 
ficance of the Past. XII. On the relation between Philosophy and Theology. 

For a German work we will take that of the late Albert Peip, of Gottingen, 
edited by Dr. Theodore Hoppe, Glitersloh, 1879.^ His Introduction consists 
of three sections : i . The Definition of the Philosophy of Religion or the 
adjustment of it as a central science to Philosophy as a whole. 2, Historical 
Development of the Philosophy of Religion and its present Task. 3. Pro- 
posed Divisions. 

The body of the work is divided into three Parts : the first, treating of the 
Essence of Religion, the second, of the Historical Forms of its manifestation, 
and the third presenting a Critical Comparison of these forms. Sections 4-8 

1 For other German plans see The Philosophies of Religion by Piinjer (1886) ; Rauwenhoff (1889) 
Sydel(i893); Siebeck (1893) ; Krause (1893) ; etc. 



58 The Religions of the World 

are a special introduction on the term Religion, as defined by different writers, 
on possible religious Defects and on the hypothetical Necessity of a Revela- 
tion of Salvation. Sections 9-14 treat of the Being of God in His relation 
to the World, especially to Men. Here are treated the so-called proofs of 
the existence of God and their criticism, the result reached being that while 
these arguments do not demonstrate the existence of God of Christian Revela- 
tion, they do establish and define the philosophical conception of an eternal, 
almighty, and all-wise Being in such wise as to prepare the foundation for the 
faith in the God of Revelation. Sections 15-19 treat of the being of Man in 
his relation to God. Section 20 is on the Hypothetical Necessity of the In- 
carnation, and closes Part First. Section 21 introduces Part Second by pro- 
posing a division of the forms of religious manifestation in the world, that is, 
the religious systems into Natural and Revealed. Section 22 proposes a 
division of Natural Religion into three varieties, to wit: (i) the not yet 
mythological ; (2) the mythological, and (3) no longer mythological. The 
first of these varieties, including unsystematic nature-deification, astrology, 
and the Chinese imperial religion, is sketched in sections 23-25. The second 
covers sections 26-31, and includes the religion of India, those of Asia Minor, 
Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia. 

The third variety, embracing Buddhism and Germanic Religion, fills sec- 
tions 31-33. Modern Judaism (section 34) is considered so corrupt as to be 
classed under the general head of Natural Religion. Revealed Religion is 
sketched only very briefly in section 35, and Islam as an appendix in section 
36, which closes Part II. Part III, which was to present Comparative The- 
ology, had not been worked out at the time of the author's death. Less than 
three pages are given as* sketching what was in the author's plan. 

Lotze's Philosophy of Religion is a small book of lecture-outlines, trans- 
lated by Professor Ladd, of New Haven. It has two defects : first, it no- 
where defines religion ; and second, it nowhere informs us what a Philosophy 
of Religion should be. 

Passing now to the constituent Divisions, Parts and Chapters 
of the present Book, we briefly survey the broad field opened to 
the student by the philosophic study of Religions and of the 
World-religion. 



and the World-Religion. 59 



DIVISION FIRST. 

Philosophy of the Data implying and variously illus- 
trating THE TRUE Object of Religion and His per- 
sonal Bearing over against the Subject in the 
Unity of the World-religion. 

The most general and significant of the data here meant are 
the universal human consciousness of Dependence, and the in- 
tellectual postulates requisite to an understanding of the his- 
toric and current expressions of this consciousness in forms of 
pious and impious Self-surrender. 

The logically inevitable implication of the universal human 
consciousness of Dependence is the finiteness of the subject, 
and of all human subjects. And the logically inevitable impli- 
cation of the finiteness of all dependent human subjects is an 
extra- or super-human Object, independent and infinite. In 
this, all religionists capable of philosophic thought agree. 

PART I. 

The Philosophy of the Finite ; isstdng in the Postulate of a Per- 
sonality non-finite and holy, the independent Object of the 
World-re ligioji . 

A full presentation of the philosophy of the Finite in its re- 
lation to the Infinite would require the elaboration of at least 
the following chapters : — 

CHAPTER I. 

The Ontology of the Finite ; or the Philosophy of its Existence. 
Outcome : The postulate of a pre-existent and adequate Cause. 

CHAPTER n. 

The Etiology of the Finite ; or the Philosophy of the Causation of the 
Finite. 

Outcome : The postulate of an orderly Adjustment of causes, and of a 
Cause for this orderly adjustment of causes. 



6o The Religions of the World 

CHAPTER III. 

The Cosmology of the F'inite ; or the Philosophy of the Orderliness of the 
Finite, 

Outcome : The postulate of Purpose in all cosmical adjustments of Causes, 
including a Moral Purpose in the Moral Order, 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Ethics of the Finite ; or the Philosophy of the Moral Order in the 
Finite . 

Outcome : The postulate ot a Moral Personality back of and underneath 
all the causal adjustments and ethical orderings of the Finite, 

CHAPTER V. 

The Teleology of the Finite ; or the Philosophy of the supreme Aim and 
Goal of the Finite. 

Outcome : The postulate of a beginningless and endless Personality, work- 
ing from ethical aims, and effecting, under the forms of time and space, a 
perpetually on-going Self-manifestation or Self-revelation of Himself, in and 
unto finite intelligences. 

PART II. 

PhilosopJiy of the Self-revelation of God in and nnto Man ; 
issuing in the posinlate of a Divine Incarnatio7i. 

The Self-revelation of God should be studied with reference 
to its primal motive, its law, its possible forms, and its possible 
consummation. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Source or primal Motive of all normal Self-revelations. 

Outcome : Unselfish love the only worthy Source or primal Motive of Self- 
revelation in the personal sphere. 

CHAPTER II. 

The Law of all normal Self-revelation of God. 

Outcome : All Self-revelations of the Infinite Personality to the finite are 
modes of self-limitation ; on the contrary every right self-revelation of the 
finite personality to the Infinite is a mode of emancipation from self-limita- 
tions. 



and the World-Religion, 6i 

CHAPTER III. 

Forms of the Self-revelation of God. 

Outcome : The forms of the Self-revelation of God are determined partly 
by His own nature, partly by the counter-bearing of those for whom the 
revelation is designed. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Self-revelation of God as affected by pious forms of self-surrender on 
the part of Man. 
Outcome : The receptiveness and responsiveness of a man at any moment 
the gauge of the present possibilities of God's Self-revelation to that man, 
but not the gauge of future possibilities. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Self-revelation of God as affected by impious forms ot self-surrender on 
the part of Man. 
Outcome : The unreceptiveness and irresponsiveness of a man at any mo- 
ment the gauge of the present barriers to God's Self-revelation to that man, 
but not the gauge of future barriers. 

CHAPTER VI. 

God's Self-revelation to Man in its intensive Perfection. 

Outcome : The Self-revelation of God to Man can reach intensive comple- 
tion only in a divine Incarnation. 

CHAPTER VII. 

God's Self-revelation in its extensive Perfection. 

Outcome : The Self-revelation of God to Man cannot be conceived oi as 
ever attaining extensive completion. This would require not only the con- 
ception of a completed Humanity, but also that of a completed life and death 
eternal. 



DIVISION SECOND. 

Philosophy of the data implying and variously illustra- 
ting THE TRUE Subject of Religion and his personal 
Bearing over against the Object in the unity of the 
World-religion. 

' The most general and significant of the data here meant are 
the universal human consciousness of unfulfilled Obligation and 



62 The Religions of the World 

the intellectual postulates requisite to an understanding of the 
historic and current expressions of this consciousness in forms 
of pious and impious Self-assertion.-^ 

The logically inevitable implication of this universal human 
consciousness of unfulfilled Obligation is the moral Imperfection 
of the subject, and of all human subjects. And the logically 
inevitable implication of the moral imperfection of all human 
subjects is the need of a Perfection, moral and at one time or 
another attainable. In this all religionists capable of philo- 
sophic thought agree. 

PART L 

The Philosophy of Human Sin : issuing in the postulate of a 
Race of unholy Personalities, the obligated Subjects of the 
World-religion . 

A full presentation of moral Imperfection (Sin), in its relation 
to moral Perfection (Holiness), would require the elaboration of 
at least the following Chapters : — 

CHAPTER I. 

The Ontology of Sin ; or the Philosophy of the Existence of moral Imper- 
fection. 

Outcome : The postulate of the absolute absence of a cause for sin in any- 
thing anterior to or apart from a first sinner. 

CHAPTER n. 

The Etiology of Sin ; or the Philosophy of its possible Causation in a first 
sinner. 
Outcome : The postulate of Moral Freedom under that form of God's 
Self-revelation called the moral World-order. 

CHAPTER HI. 

The Cosmology of Sin ; or the Philosophy of universal moral Imperfection 
in its relation to the universal moral World-order in the human sphere. 

Outcome : The postulate of unholy Purposes, present and more or less 
operative in all men. 

1 •' The best measure of the profundity of any religious teaching is given by its conception of sin 
and the cure of sin." — Amiel. 



a7id the World- Religion, 63 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Ethics of Sin ; or the Philosophy of universal moral Imperfection in its 
relation to the .human will, individual and generic. 
Outcome : The postulate of morally imperfect emotions and perceptions 
back of and underlying the immoral volitions of individuals ; and more re- 
motely the postulate of an unholy race-choice back of and underlying all 
morally imperfect race-emotions, race-perceptions, and race-volitions. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Teleology of Sin ; or the Philosophy of universal moral Imperfection 
in its relation to the divine Aim and Goal of human history, 
Outcome : The postulate of a Race of genealogically cohering, individ- 
ually and co-operatively Self-actualizing personalities, working from ethical 
and unethical aims, and effecting, under the forms of time and space, a per- 
petually on-going Self-manifestation or Self-revelation of itself and of its 
constituent personalities in and unto God. 

PART II. 

Philosophy of the Self -rev elation of Man in and unto God issuing 
in the postulate of a human Indivination. 

Unlike that of God, the Self-revelation of a man is twofold, 
normal and abnormal. Some of his forms of Self-assertion are 
pious, some are impious. The philosophy of the total revela- 
tion must include the one class as fully as the other. 

Again, human Self-manifestations are more than the term im- 
plies. They not only show what the Self now is, but also help 
to determine what the Self is hereafter to be. 

CHAPTER I. 
Sin as a mode of Self-revelation. 

Outcome : While unselfish love should be the primal motive in all Self- 
revelation, selfish love is the primal motive in this. 

CHAPTER II. 
The Law of sinful Self-revelation. 

Outcome : The Self-revelation being an unnatural one, its law is also un- 
natural : the revelation follows a law, not of emancipation, but of enslave- 
ment to unnatural self-limitations. 



64 The Religions of the World 

CHAPTER III. 

Forms of sinful Self-revelation. 

Outcome : The forms of the sinful Self-revelation of men are determined 
partly by their own nature, partly by the counter-bearing of Him against 
whom these Self-revelations are directed. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Holy living as a mode of Self-revelation on the part of Man. 

Outcome : Here man reaches the primal motive of God's Self-revelation, a 
pure and unselfish love. 

CHAPTER V. 

The Law of holy Self-revelation. 

Outcome : Here man comes under the blessed law of progressive emanci- 
pation from Self-limitations, and constantly increasing assimilation to God. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Forms of holy Self-revelation on the part of Man. 

Outcome : Every pious Self-assertion on the part of man calls out new 
Self-revelations on the part of God, and so renders possible new degrees and 
forms of holy Self-revelation on man's part, and all this in indefinite succes- 
sions of action and reaction. 

CHAPTER VII. 

Man's Self- revelation in and unto God in its intensive Perfection. 

Outcome : The Self-revelation of man in and unto God can reach intensive 
completeness only in a human Indivination. 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Man's Self-revelation in and unto God in its extensive Perfection. 

Outcome : The Self-revelation of Man in and unto God cannot be con- 
ceived of as ever attaining extensive completion. This v^'ould require not 
only the conception of a completed Humanity, but also that of a completed 
life, and death eternal. 



and the World-Religion. 65 



DIVISION THIRD. 

Philosophy of the data implying and variously illus- 
trating THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE InTER-RELA- 

TioN OF Object and Subject as gradually determined 

AND redetermined IN THE ONE VITAL HISTORIC MOVEMENT 
OR PROCESS OF THE WORLD-RELIGION. 

The data here meant include the sum total of the religious 
phenomena of the world. All these phenomena both imply and 
illustrate in one or more aspects the inter-relation of God and 
man at one or more points in the historic process of the World- 
religion. 

PART I. 

The Inter-relation of God and Man as seen in the Ideal. 

This may be presented in various aspects as in the following 

chapters : — 

CHAPTER I. 

Intellectual Inter-relation as determined by ideally perfect reciprocal Self- 
revelations on the part of God and Man. 

Outcome : Ideally perfect intellectual intercommunion of God and Man. 

CHAPTER II. 

Emotional Inter-relation as determined by ideally perfect reciprocal Self- 
revelations on the part of God and Man. 

Outcome : Ideally perfect intercommunion of feeling between God and 
Man. 

CHAPTER III. 

Volitional Inter-relation as determined by ideally perfect reciprocal Self- 
revelations on the part of God and Man. 

Outcome : Ideally perfect intercommunion of will and purpose between God 
and Man. 

CHAPTER IV. , 

The Ideal Inter-relations in their vital unity. 

Outcome : Since the ideally perfect Self-revelation of God culminates in a 
divine Incarnation, and the ideally perfect Self-revelation of Man culminates 
in a human Indivination, the ideally perfect Inter-relations of God and Man 



66 The Religions of the World 

in their vital unity are presented in no other rehgion than in the World- 
religion, and in no other consciousness than that of the God-man. 

CHAPTER V. 
Review of the Religions of the World in the light of ideally perfect religion. 

PART II. 

The Inter-relations of God and Man as given in Christian Con- 
sciousness. 

In proportion as the self-revealing man comes to a clear per- 
ception of the self-revealing God, in like proportion does he be- 
come conscious of an inter-relation subsisting between himself 
and God. In case his own self-revelation is proceeding from an 
unholy principle, he is conscious that the relation between him- 
self and the holy God is one of vital estrangement and opposi- 
tion. On the other hand, if his own Godward bearing of mind 
and will and affection is the normal response of the creature to 
the care and benevolence and affection of his Creator, the mu- 
tual personal Verhalten results in a mutual personal Verhdltniss 
as normal and blessed as the activities from which it proceeds 
and by which it is maintained. And this relationship of inter- 
communion and fellowship is more truly and vitally a fact of 
consciousness than can be a like relationship between two most 
intimate sharers in a human friendship. 

The actual inter-relations of a particular human soul and God 
are normal in proportion as they approximate the above defined 
ideal. 

The evolution of the Christian Consciousness has often been 
misrepresented. It is not by any means uniform with respect 
to origin or successional order of personal experiences and at- 
tainments of insight. It is in all cases a divine-human product, 
but many things are true of it in its maturity that are not true 
of it in earlier stages. Many teachers have failed to represent 
it correctly because of a failure on their part to perceive the 
dependence of one spiritual perception or experience upon an- 
other, or upon a preceding group. It is difficult to construct a 
description of the process which shall cover all cases in all stages 
of earthly development, but the following covers at least ^ 



a7td the World-Religion. 6y 

typical case, and gives due prominence to the proportionality of 
one element to another in the ever-growing result. 

1. In order to the ultimate attainment of complete self-knowl- 
edge, and in order to the acquisition of the power to pass just 
judgments upon himself, every human being in the process of 
his development from infancy to maturity of reason has need of 
instruction from some source apart from himself. 

2. In proportion as the developing human being, aided by true 
and wholesome instruction, becomes competent to form just 
judgments relative to his own physical, mental and spiritual 
activities and qualities, in like proportion does he come to re- 
cognize the fact that, judged even according to his own ideals, 
he is to a greater or less extent culpably defective and imperfect 
— a being who with more or less of voluntary consent, practi- 
cally comes short of the possible perfections of his own life and 
character. 

3. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being, perplexed by this discovery, struggles to comprehend the 
nature and implications and sanctions of his own ideals, and in 
conduct strives with redoubled earnestness to measure up to the 
best possibilities of his being, in like proportion does he become 
conscious of the presence and agency of an environing Person- 
ality all perfect and holy, a God in whom he lives and moves and 
has his being. 

4. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being attains this consciousness of God and of his own natural 
and personal relations to God, in like proportion does he come 
to perceive that his own capacities for improvement are God- 
given and that all instruction in or toward a holy development 
— whatever the name or nature or means of that instruction — 
is a form of Divine Revelation. 

5. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being is thus brought to discern the manifoldness and continu- 
ousness of Divine Revelation, in like proportion does he come 
to recognize the fact that all History and all Reality are but 
modes of a perpetual, all-inclusive Self-Manifestation of the 
Divine. 



68 The Religions of the World 

6. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being is brought to this perception of the perpetually and 
universally progressing Self-Manifestation of God, in like pro- 
portion does he come to expect in human nature and in the 
human sphere possibilities and instances of divine disclosure 
superior to any elsewhere discoverable. 

7. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being thus comes to expect in human nature the highest known 
or as yet knowable forms of God's Self-Manifestation, in like 
proportion does he reach the assured conviction that in God's 
eternal purpose humanity v^as intended to be an organ of the 
Divine, and that in the historic ripening of God's purpose in and 
through the agencies of His temporal kingdom there shall ulti- 
mately come to be a redeemed and renovated humanity, faultlessly 
expressive of the divine holiness, a habitation of God through 
the Spirit. 

8. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being, inspired by such an anticipation, searches through history 
to discover any foretokens of this consummation of all things in 
a divinized humanity, and especially to discover any individuals 
in whom the divinizing process may seem to have been anti- 
cipated and measurably foreshown, in like proportion does he 
come to fix upon Jesus of Nazareth as the one man in whom the 
divine indwelling and outshining are apparently complete — the 
one man entitled to be considered an archetype of perfected 
humanity. 

9. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being, moved by the sense of his own culpable imperfections, 
and by the inworkings of his divine environment, cordially sur- 
renders himself to the divine activities and lovingly strives to 
become an organic yet most personal part of God's Self-Mani- 
festation in humanity, in like proportion does he find his per- 
sonal ideals, aspirations and activities coming into living con- 
formity with those historically exemplified in Christ Jesus. 

10. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being advances in this progressive conformity of ideals, aspira- 
tions and activities to the ideals, aspirations and activities of 



and the World-Religion. 69 

Jesus Christ, in like proportion does he become a living and 
more or less conscious partaker of the Spirit of Christ, the 
Comforter, who, according to promise, is given to guide into all 
truth. 

11. In proportion as the instructed and developing human 
being thus becomes a living and conscious partaker of Christ's 
Spirit, in like proportion does he become conscious of a vital 
personal relation to all other partakers, and to that spiritual 
Kingdom or Church which these, together with their Head, 
vitally and organically constitute in the unity of the Holy Ghost. 

12. Finally, in proportion as the instructed and developing 
human being, in his progressive unfoldment, in one order or 
another, passes up through these various steps and stages of 
the spiritual life — and only in that proportion — does he ob- 
tain a correct, a truly rational and real insight into the nature, 
extent and deadliness of sin, into the nature and need of an 
atonement, into the beauty of holiness, into the conscious bless- 
edness of the life in God and of the life in the everlasting fel- 
lowship of God's children. 

To the foregoing theses every Christian teacher in the world 
can consistently and cordially subscribe. And whoever in his 
own experience has come to all the insights above mentioned, 
and lives in the light of them, is certainly to be called a Christian. 
But a Christian of the broadest and most radical character can- 
not rest at this point. He finds in these propositions no con- 
sistent and satisfying philosophy of three fundamental Christian 
truths, to wit : (i) the universality of human sin ; (2) the sin- 
lessness of Jesus Christ ; and (3) the unity of that God into 
whose three divine names each Christian, in professing his faith, 
must be baptized. The great mass of thoughtful and earnest 
Christians, therefore, reach, and in all past Christian centuries 
have reached, additional convictions and insights on these points. 
But here, as before, the law under which insight is gained is a 
law of proportion, a law which may be approximately expressed 
in the three following propositions : — 

I. In proportion as the instructed and developing Christian 
learns to recognize the real solidarity of all naturally engendered 



70 The Religions of the World 

human individuals, and their ideal solidarity in the one primal 
purpose and plan of the Creator to constitute them together 
one vitally interwoven, organic species or form of divine Self- 
Manifestation, in like proportion does he come to the perception 
that a free and thorough-going self-closure of the first human 
beings to divine influence through sin could not fail to entail 
upon propagated human nature blindnesses and blights as far- 
reaching as the line of human generations, — a self-centredness 
of heart and will as hateful as hate and as deadly as death ; 
and that, philosophically considered, the universality of sin in 
the experience of all peoples and ages must find its deepest, its 
most rational explanation in the Biblical doctrine of a primeval 
Fall of Man. 

2. In proportion as the instructed and developing Christian 
comes to see in and back of all individual sin a universally 
transmitted, everywhere present race-characteristic — an inbred 
self-centredness of will and affection which, so long as unchecked 
by outside powers, effectually disqualifies the individual and the 
race for their normal function of receiving and joyously mani- 
festing forth the indwelling of Divinity, in like proportion does 
he come to the perception that the supreme need of fallen hu- 
manity can have been no other than a creative re-opening of 
itself to the divine incoming, and that the Incarnation, or better 
the Menschwerdungy of God's Eternal Son, and the Mission of 
the Comforter, constitute, as the New Testament teaches, the 
one all-sufificient and most gracious response of God to this ne- 
cessity of his human creatures. 

3. In proportion as the instructed and developing Christian, 
pondering the mysteries of speculative Theism and the reliev- 
ing disclosures of Biblical Revelation comes to apprehend, on 
the one hand, the inconceivableness of a unipersonal Absolute, 
and on the other the triunity of the historic Self-Manifestation 
of God in and through the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost, in like proportion will his strained and almost baffled 
mind find growing relief and restful delight and holy confidence 
in some approximation, if not in full adhesion to some form of 
the general Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 



and the World-Religion. 71 

The above statements illustrate not only the growth of the 
Christian Consciousness, but also the fluency and growthfulness 
of the inter-relations of the soul and God. 

A full presentation of the Philosophy of the Christian Con- 
sciousness would require the elaboration of at least the following 

chapters : — 

CHAPTER I. 

Of Consciousness in general, and the self-evident Validity of its Deliver- 
ances. 

CHAPTER n. 

The Legitimacy, Indispensableness and Scientific Value of the Testimony 
of Consciousness in the realm of subjective religious Activities and Re- 
sults. 

CHAPTER III. 

The Contents of the genuinely Christian Consciousness. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Conceivability and Credibility of a concurrent divine and human witnessing 
to a lost, and to a re-established personal Fellowship between the Soul 
and God. 

CHAPTER V. 

The absolutely verifying Force of the Testimony of the Christian Con- 
sciousness when individually and actually possessed. 

CHAPTER VI. 

The necessary Skepticism, or Liability to Skepticism, of all Souls not pos- 
sessed of the self-evidencing light of Consciousness touching personal 
Fellowship with God. 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Christian Consciousness of the Individual as related to the larger 
Christian Consciousness of the true Church of Christ. 

PART III. 

The Inter-relations of God and Man as determined and ever re- 
determined in the historic life of the World-religion. 

The Inter-relations of God and Humanity in history have 
never for two successive moments remained fixed and unaltered. 
Since their beginning the flow of God's Sdf-revelation and the 



72 The Religions of the World 

flow of Man's Self-revelation have been incessant. With each 
new heart-beat Humanity itself becomes other than it was. 
Equally mutable and transmutable must be that vital relation- 
ship in which and under which the twain activities, divine and 
human, endlessly persist. 

Whoever in his own personal consciousness has known the 
abnormal relationship of blind personal hostility to God, and 
now in his own consciousness knows the blessedness of an" 
established and ever-growing fellowship with God, has little 
difficulty with the problems of Humanity's religious history. 
His own childhood typifies to him the childhood of his race. 
His own debasing paganisms fully interpret to him the most 
debasing paganisms of mankind. Himself miraculously new- 
born of God, the miraculous birth at Bethlehem is more than 
credible. Himself possessor of the Holy Comforter, the spirit- 
ual history of the living Church would be to him a mystery but 
for its outstart from a world-historic Pentecost. 

Again, to such a man philosophies of history that ignore or 
reject the Divine factor are self-refuted in advance. He sees 
that in proportion as the Divine co-efficient is overlooked the 
human is misconceived and distorted. History being the result 
of Divine activity in and through men, and at the same time of 
men's activity in and through Deity, a consistently atheistic 
philosophy of history is as little conceivable as is a consistently 
ananthropistic. 

The normal inter-relations of God and man being found only 
in those souls in which the divine-human fellowship and life 
have been re-established, it is only natural that the true knowl- 
edge of these inter-relations is found only with these souls and 
with those whom they have instructed. Furthermore it is only 
natural that all those who hold this knowledge merely as a mat- 
ter of instruction, should hold it as they hold other matters of 
human testimony, that is, not as genuine knowledge, but at 
best only as a theoretical and more or less questionable belief. 

The genuine knowledge of the normal divine and human re- 
lationship is alone with them that stand in it and stand in it con- 
sciously. The majority of them are dwelling in the heavenly 
places. Even with these it is a growing knowledge. 



and the World- Religion, 75 

From the days of the God-man the World-religion has been 
teaching that there has been in the progress of history a cer- 
tain succession of exeptionally important modifications in the 
Inter-relations of God and Humanity. As this teaching consti- 
tutes the philosophy of Humanity's history according to the 
World-religion, it well deserves attention. The following enu- 
meration presents the view, not only as it is in itself, but also 
as it stands related to a larger conception of the total history of 
the moral universe : — 

I. The absolutely primal Inter-relations of God and moral 
creatures anterior to all creaturely self-revelation in consciously 
and purposely good or evil self-assertion. (Monergistically and 
divinely determined. Not so much prehistoric, as history-initiat- 
ing). 

II. These Inter-relations as modified in a pre-human world- 
aeon, partly by creaturely self-revelation in consciously and pur- 
posely good and evil self-assertion, and partly by new forms of 
divine self-revelation appropriate to these creaturely self-revela- 
tions in good and evil. (So conceived the new inter-relations 
would have to be described as synergistically determined. 
Moreover, the creaturely contribution toward their determina- 
tion would have to be conceived of as antithetically dual, that 
of evil creaturely co-efficients and that of the good.) 

III. These Inter-relations as modified by the introduction of 
two race-bearing and race-representing creatures, of more than 
angelic possibiliti s, parents of unknown millions of moral 
creatures, proprietors of a world requiring ages for its roughest 
exploration, bearers of a divine image that was capable of becom- 
ing endlessly more divine, types and progenitors of a Seed in 
whom all the fulness of the Godhead should bodily dwell- 
Here, anterior to any conscious Godward self-revelation of these 
human creatures, we have the earliest inter-relations of God 
and Humanity. (As before, in the earlier beginning, they were 
divinely determined, independent of any agency of the newly 
created ; but that they were divinely determined irrespective of 
earlier and contemporary non-human moral creatures and of 



74 The Religions of the World 

their contribution to the quality and possibilities of the moral 
universe at the time, is theistically unthinkable.) 

IV. The same Inter-relations as modified in the pre-Chris- 
tian world-aeon partly by human self-revelation in consciously 
and purposely good and evil self-assertion, and partly by new- 
forms of divine self-revelation appropriate to these human self- 
revelations in good and evil. (Increased complexity of co-effi- 
cients, the human self-revelation both in evil and in good having 
been initially facilitated by pre-human and extra-human crea- 
turely agency.) 

V. The same Inter-relations as modified by the Incarnation 
of the Son of God and the Indivination of the Son of Man. 
(Increasing complexity of co-efficients ; even the Divine factor 
manifesting a trinally self-differentiated activity.) 

VI. The same Inter-relations as modified by the progressive 
incorporation of the Spirit of the God-man in believing Hu- 
manity in earthly places, and the progressive excorporation of 
believing Humanity in the same Spirit into the heavenly places. 
(Present post-Pentecostal world-aeon. Co-efficients : . divine, 
hypostatic and monontologic ; theanthropic; angelic, beneficent 
and maleficent ; human, evil and good, — each creaturely class, 
moreover, in "numbers without number.") 

VII. The same Inter-relations as yet to be remodified at the 
close of the present world-aeon, when in the presence of the 
whole moral universe the re-embodied Race of God-imaging 
men, complete in all its members and now forever past all fur- 
ther self-multiplication, shall stand for the first time self-re- 
vealed in and before its self-revealed Author, and both, con- 
scious of a oneness which neither life nor death eternal can de- 
stroy, face the unpicturable experiences of the endless Beyond. 

To us, catechumens in the World-religion, this Philosophy of 
World history seems difficult and high. Be it so. But a few 
more moons and we may study it under larger horizons, in mani- 
fest presence of Him who Himself was in the beginning, is now, 
and ever shall be, world without end. Amen and Amen. 



and the World-Religion. 75 



NOTES AND QUERIES 

Illustrative of the Foregoing Text. 

I. What classes of religious phenomena are mentioned by De 
la Saussaye in what he calls the Phenomenological Section of 
his *' Science of Religion " ? Pp. 67-242. 



2. In his ''Evolution of Religion," vol i. pp. 40-47, what does 
Edward Caird say on the definition of Religion } 



The World-Religion. 93 



COLLATERAL READING AND STUDY. 

The Study of Religions being a Three-hour Course with but two 
Class-hours per week, the amount of required collateral reading and 
writing is exceptional. Fortnightly reports are to be made according 
to the form on the last pages of this volume. 

The following books (or their specified alternates) are as a rule to be 
read by the whole class. The numbers in brackets are their shelf num- 
bers in the Public Library. Nearly all are in the Library of the School, 
others in the General Theological Library, and a number may well be 
purchased by the student. They should be so divided and arranged 
as to be finished before the Easter holidays. 

Sayce, The Hibbert Lectures for 1887. London 1887. [3491.69, or 
K. 156.2]. 
Or, Z. A. Ragozin, The Story of Chaldea. London and New York, 
1886. [940.28 or 3077.82]. 
Geo. Rawlinson, The Story of Phoenicia. London and New York. 

1889. [3044.101]. 
Stobart, Islam and its Founder. London and New York, 1877, 
[5489a.58]. 
Or, E. Sell, the Faith of Islam. London, 1882. [5481.55]. 
Renouf, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians. London and New York, 

1880. [5483-52]. 
James Legge, The Religions of China. [Spring Lectures]. London, 
1880. [5489a. 81, or 5489a.86]. 
Or, R. K. Douglas, Confucianism and Tauism. London, 1879. 
[5489a.77]. 
A. Earth, The Rehgions of India. London, 1881. [5483.6]. 

Or, Monier- Williams, Hinduism. London and New York, 1879. 
[5489a.56]. 
Monier-Williams, Buddhism. New York, 1889. [3495.60]. 

Or, T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism. London and New York, 1879. 
[5489a.5i]. 
E. De Pressense, The Ancient World and Christianity. New York, 

1888. [3521.73]- 
Or, Chapters XVI and XVII of Menzies, History of Religion. 
R. Keyser, The Religion of the Northmen. New York, 1864. [6072.19, 
or 6072.20]. 
Or, Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology. London, 1889. [3496.73]. 



94 ^'^^^ Religions of the World 

J. Rhys, Hibbsrt Lectures for 1886. [Lectures L and VL] London, 
1888. [3491-77]. 

A. Reville, The Hibbert Lectures for 1884. [Mexico and Peru]. N. 

Y., 1884. [34900.54]. 

Chapters XXXIV. and XXXV. in Quatrefages, The Human Species, 
N. Y., 1879. [3829.71, or 3879-73]- 

Parts IV., v., VL, of Warren's Paradise Found ; A Study of the Pre- 
historic World. [6236.57]. 

B. P. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism. N. Y., 1887. [3584.73]. 
Or, Bowne, Studies in Theism. N. Y., 1882. [5603.71]. 

The following are Books to be Consulted. 

I'he Sacred Books of the East. Edited by Professor Max Miiller. 
Oxford [Bates Hall Reading Room]. — Records of the Past. Lon- 
don. New Series [3049.100]. — Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions 
and Old Testament. London. 2 Vols. [3420.68]. — Clarke, Ten 
Great Religions. 2 Vols. [7487.8]. — Hardwick, Christ and Other 
Masters [5446.15]. — World's Parliament of Religions [*3522.io7]. 

— ReHgious Systems of the World [3494.69]. — St. Giles Lectures 
[5484.56] also [5526.69.2]. — Max Miiller, Essays and other writ- 
ings. Reville, Prolegomena to the History of Religions [349oa.7o]. 

— A. S. Farrar, A Critical History of Free Thought. Comparing 
therewith Vols, ist and 2d of Pfieiderer's Philosophy of Religion. 
Edinburgh 1887 [3600a. 21]. — H. Spencer, Descriptive Sociology. 
London [*356o.5o] and New York, 8 vols. [*356o.5i]. — Piinjer, 
History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion [German, 7602.66]. 

Periodicals to be Consulted. 

Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology. London. The 
Babylonian and Oriental Record. London. Journal of the Ameri- 
can Oriental Society [*4244.7]. — The American Journal of Archae- 
ology. — Journal of the Victoria Institute. London [*32 2 7.5]. — 
Revue de I'Histoire des Religions. Paris [*5436.5i]. — Zeitschrift 
der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft. — Revue des Religions 
[Rom. Catholic]. — Annales du Musee Guimet [*3490.55]. — Journal 
Asiatique [*3327.5o]. — Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly State- 
ments. London [^5077. 50]. — Egypt Exploration Fund Reports. 
London [*304oa.ii7]. — Zeitschrift ftir Assyriologie. Leipzig 
[*5 074.60]. — Biblia. Meriden, Conn. — The Imperial and Asiatic 
Quarterly Review. 



and the World- Religion. 



95 



SPECIMEN TOPICS FOR CLASS PAPERS. 

Ill each case, where practicable, the student is expected to prefix to his paper a 
formal list of the best sources he has found for the investigation of his subject, and an 
enumeration of all previous disctissions of it kiioivn to him. 



1 . Classify and briefly describe the 
thus far issued volumes of the " Sa- 
cred Books of the East/' 

2. Antediluvian Religion accord- 
ing to the most ancient traditions 



of mankind. 
therefrom. 



Reasonable inferences 



3. Wherein does Fetishism agree 
with, and wherein differ from, such 
idolatry as was practised by the 
Greeks at the time of the advent of 
Christ. 

4. Reasons in view of which 
Totemism may be held to belong to 
a lower stage of human thought than 
Fetishism. (Or, if preferred : What 
arguments will render it probable 
that Fetishism is a degenerate and 
retrograde form of religion and not 
at the same time render it probable 
that Totemism is?) 

5. Reasons for and against the 
notion, that the earliest form of reli- 
gion was identical either (i) with 
one of the forms found among modern 
savages ; or (2) with a form found by 
combining all the common features 
of the savage religions and leaving 
out of view peculiarities not found in 
all of the class, 

6. Clearly weak or questionable 
points in the representation of the 
Earliest Religion of the Semites in 
the writings of Robertson Smith. 



7. Character of Anu and his rela- 
tion to the other gods of Babylonia 
according to the original texts. (Be- 
gin by looking up each reference un- 
der the term "Anu'' in the index to 
Maspero's Dawn of Civilization ; 
then read with care fuller translations 
of the texts.) 

8. Monotheistic expressions and 
implications in the Shi-king. (See 
"God" in the index to Legge's 
Chinese Classics. Vol. iv, pts. i and 
2, at p. 659.) 

9. Reasons for and against the 
opinion that the first author of any 
particular myth about the gods, as, 
e.g., that of the birth of Athena from 
the head of Zeus, or that of Shu 
uplifting the body of Nut, really be- 
lieved that the story he told re- 
presented a literal fact of divine 
history. 

10. Reasons for and against the 
idea that Human Sacrifice was a con- 
stituent part of the earliest form of 
religion. Inferences. 

1 1 . Which is the more probable, 
that ordinary cannibalism arose from 
a preexisting habit of offering to the 
gods human sacrifices ; or that human 
sacrifices resulted from preexisting 
cannibalism ; or that each arose in- 
dependently of the other? Reasons 
for your conclusions. 



96 



The Religions of the World 



12. Carefully define Animal Wor- 
ship and present the reasons for and 
against the idea that it was the ear- 
liest form of religion. 

13. Reasons for and against the 
idea that Ancestor- and Ghost-wor- 
ship was the earliest form of religion. 
(See Herbert Spencer and his cri- 
tics.) 

14. Were we to admit that in their 
day all the gods of the polytheistic 
peoples really existed, to what extent 
would this require us to modify our 
conceptions of God, of the spirit- 
world, of man, and of history? 

15. Define Devil-Worship, and 
discuss the leading theories of its 
origin, diffusion and maintenance. 

16. Mythical Descents to Hades. 
A comparative study. 

17. Mythical Ascents to Heaven, 
beginning with that of Adapa to the 
heaven of Anu. What light do they 
throw on the geographical and cos- 
mological ideas of the ancients ? 

18. What facts set forth in John 
O'NeilPs Night of the Gods [3601. 
123] tell in favor of the theory of the 
North-polar origin of the Human 
Race? What, if any, against it? 

19. The Salvability of Pagans ac- 
cording to the Westminster Assem- 
bly, and according to Fletcher of 
Madeley (Works, vol. iii, pp. 166- 
197)- 

20. Sin viewed from the stand- 
point of the polytheist, the pantheist, 
and the Christian theist. See Julius 
Mliller, et al. 

21. Wherein agree and ffider 



Drummond's Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World and Butler"'s Anal- 
ogy. 

22. To what extent do Tennyson, 
Robert Browning and Sidney Lanier 
agree in their representation of 
Christ, and of Man's need of him? 

23. Proper Attitude of the Christ- 
ian Missionary over against native 
adherents to the ' ' Doomed Reli- 
gion." 

24. Prepare a list of "books of 
reference," then ten or more vital 
questions, some of them with brief 
answers of your own, all arranged so 
as to present a " Specimen Study " of 
the religion of the pre-Christian Ha- 
waiians, after the general plan of 
those presented in print in your note- 
book. 

25. Considerations showing the 
comparative meaninglessness of a 
" divine" incarnation in any system 
in which the incarnated " god" may 
have been a man, or even a beast, 
or a reptile before becoming " di- 
vine." For illustrations see Hindu 
mythology and the Buddhistic 
' ' Birth-Stories " (Jataka) . 

26. Compare the Mohammedan 
and the Mormon teaching respecting 
the new dispensation of the kingdom 
of God, which they respectively pro- 
fess to represent. 

27. Name and briefly describe 
Max Muller's different works on Re- 
ligion. (Not forgetting his article, 
" Why I am not an Agnostic," in the 
Nineteenth Century, for December 
1894.) 

28. The Gammadion (Swastica) : 



and the World- Religion. 



97 



Theories of its origin and significance. 
See Goblet d'Alviella, The Migra- 
tions of Symbols [3484.101], and 
O'Neill, Night of the Gods [3601. 

123]- 

29. An imaginary Conversation 
between Socrates and Sakyamuni 
the evening before the death of the 
former. 

30. History of learned opinion as 
to Zoroaster. 

3 1 . Just and unjust criticisms of 
Arnold's " Light of Asia." 

32. Agnosticism. See late utter- 
ances by Huxley, Leslie Stephen, 
Wace, Mallock, Spencer, Romanes, 
Balfour, Bowne, etc. 

33. How Religious Ideas have af- 
fected custom in the disposal of the 
bodies of the dead. 

34 . Attempted Reform Movements 
in Judaism since the destruction of 
the temple and Holy City. 

35. Origin, history and religious 
significance of the Oracle of Delphi. 

36. Progress of Theistic Thought 
since Kant. 

37. What was the significance and 
probable influence of the controversy 
between Frederic Harrison and Her- 
bert Spencer touching the Nature and 
Reality of Religion. See [3590a. 62] 
and [3590a. 69] . 

38 . Eschatology of the Greek Tra- 
gedians compared with that of Ho- 
mer. 

39. Give an account of Cicero's 
tractate '' De Divinatione ,'''' with trans- 
lations of important key-statements, 



and an estimate of its probable effect 
upon readers in Cicero's days. 

40 . The cosmography of Buddhism 
compared and contrasted with that of 
Brahmanism. With illustrative draw- 
ings. — See Spence Hardy, Ward, 
Paradise Found, etc. 

41. The Religion of the Druses 
and its representation in Browning's 
poem " The Return of the Druses." 

42. What Plato thought of Greek 
Mythology . 

43 . Compare and contrast original 
Buddhism and Fourierism. 



44. Compare and contrast B^bism 
and original Shakerism. See writ- 
ings of Edward G. Browne and au- 
thorized doctrinal publications of the 
Shakers . 

45 . In what points did the religions 
of the ancient Persians and Romans 
most resemble each other ; and in 
what most differ ? 

46. Compare and contrast the An- 
gelogy and Demonology of the Koran 
and of the Roman Catholic Church. 

47. Wherein differs the Buddhism 
of Japan from original Buddhism ? 
See inter al. Griffis [3487.126], and 
Oldenberg [3484.72]. 

48 . Compare and contrast the views 
of John Wesley and of Jonathan Ed- 
wards touching the highest form of 
Religious Experience. 

49 . Criticisms of Pfleiderer in Rau- 
wenhoff ' s Religionsphilosophie . 

50. Reasons adduced by Kern and 
others for considering the legend- 



98 



The Religions of the World 



ary Life of Buddha merely a version 
of the Solar Myth. 

5 1 . The various Conceptions of 
Human Pre-existence. 

52. Was the Papal doctrine of 
purgatory of extra-Christian Origin ? 

53. " The Religion of Humanity" 
as presented by Comte and as elabo- 
rated by Frederic Harrison. 

54. The doctrine of the Resurrec- 
tion in ethnic Religions. 

55. The theological development 
of John Wesley. 

56. The "Prayer-Gauge" chal- 
lenge and the best responses thereto. 

57. Egyptian Cosmology, (See 
Question under " Specimen Studies 
— Egypt.") 

58. Are cases of demoniacal pos- 
session still found in heathen com- 
munities ? See ijiter al. Nevins 
[5606.30]. 

59. Paul Regnaud's theory of the 
Origin of Religion from a primeval 
habit of kindling household fires with 
an inflammable oil. (Les premieres 
Formes de la Religion et de la Tradi- 
tion dans rinde et la Gr^ce. Paris, 
1894.) 

60. The Sibylline Books. 

61. Varuna and Shang-ti. The 
Heaven-god of the Chinese and that 
of the ancestors of the Hindus com- 
pared. 

62 . Significance of Jainism for the 
understanding of Buddhism. 

63. Celibacy from religious mo- 
tives in the non-Christian Religions. 



(First consult H. C. Lea's " History 
of Sacerdotal Celibacy ." [5516.71] .) 

64. The gods Shu and Ninib. A 
comparative study. 

65 . The approaches and reces- 
sions of SaLfioviov and delov in mean- 
ing, in the history of Greek litera- 
ture and philosophy. 

66. Is Phallicism, among the Hin- 
dus, a part of their religion, or rather 
of their irreligion? Principles for 
the determining of such questions. 

67. Inferences from the Scatolo- 
gical Riles of various nations. J. G. 
Bourke. [*^* 2235.1 17.] 

68. Theories of Mythogony. 

69. Origin and teachings of the 
Adi-Granth. (Sacred book of the 
Sikhs.) 

70. Nature and Signification of the 
differences between "High Mass" 
in the Papal Church and the corres- 
ponding service in the Oriental 
Churches of the Greek Rite. 

71. Extant Organs and Organiza- 
tions of Theosophists. 

72. What light, if any, does the 
De Anima of Aristotle throw upon the 
Ka conception of the ancient Egyp- 
tians ? 

73 . Just and unjust Criticisms upon 
Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. 

74. Latest French works on the 
Origin, Essence and historical Devel- 
opment of Religion. 

75. Latest German works on the 
Origin, Essence, and historical De- 
velopment of Religion. 



and tJie World-Religion. gg 



SPECIMEN STUDIES. 



I. 

The Religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians histori- 
cally, SYSTEMATICALLY, AND PHILOSOPHICALLY CONSIDERED. 

Books of Reference: Records of the Past. New Series. — Works of 
Sayce, Lenormant, George Smith, Boscawen, Theodore Pinches, Henry C. 
Rawlinson, Fritz Hommel, Paul Haupt, C. F. Tiele, Friedricli Dehtzsch, 
Schrader, Jensen, etc. — More popular: Budge, Wm. Hayes Ward, and 
Madame Ragozin. — Morris Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria. — 
J. F. McCurdy, History, Prophecy and the Monuments. [2293. iii]. — 
Sayce, Higher Criticism and the Monuments. [3425.108]. — W. St. Chad 
Boscawen, The Bible and the Monuments. 1895. — Geo. Rawlinson, An- 
cient Religions Tiele, History of Religion. — De la Saussaye, The Science 

of Religion. — Ancient Histories of Duncker, Meyer, Rawlinson. — For illus- 
trations of art, etc.: Perrot and Chipiez. [^8084. 50. 2] . Also, Maspero, 
Dawn of Civilization. [3052.141] . — Articles in best late Encyclopaedias. — 
Best chronological list of publications on Babylonia and Assyria to be found 
in Kaulen, Assyrien and Babylonien. 4th ed. 1891. [5055.82]. 

Question i. — Where have you read the fullest late account 
of this Land and People ? 



Qu. 2. — Where have you found the most helpful {a) historical 
maps ; {h) topographical charts ; {c) illustrations of divinities, 
temples, etc. ? 



lOO The Religions of the World 

Qu. 3. — What difficulties connected with the study are enu- 
merated by Sayce in his Hibbert Lectures ? (pp. 1-38). What 
advantages ? (pp. 38-84). 



a7td the Woidd-Religion. loi 

Qu. 4. — To what scholars is the credit of recovering the lan- 
guage chiefly due ? 



Qu. 5. — What was the first modern theory as to the history 
of this religion, and how has it been revolutionized ? Summarize 
from Sayce, H. L., pp. 18-24. 



I02 The Religions of the World 



Qu. 6. — In the study of our proximate sources what caution 
is needful ? 

Answer. Many recent writers upon this religion proceed upon a wholly 
unproven assumption, to wit, that from the beginning there was a steady 
advance in religious ideas, and that the farther back we go the ruder and, 
cruder were these ideas. On this principle, Lenormant considered all the 



and the World-Religion. 103 

magical texts as antedating the more rational and truly religious hymns to the 
gods. On the same ground, a penitential psalm, or a litany, showing a 
deep sense of sin, was supposed to belong of necessity to the latest period. 
On the first point, Professor Sayce has felt compelled to confess that Lenor- 
mant was hasty and mistaken. On page 322 he expressly says: "The fact 
that one text is magical while another contains a hymn to the deity does not 
itself prove the relative ages of the two documents.'' Equally groundless 
is Sayce's own procedure when he sees in every sacred animal the survival 
of a totem, a relic of the age of bygone savagery. It would be far more just, 
to reason by analogy from the case of contemporaneous Egypt, and to say 
that like as the Sphinx and other animal-forms and pictographs among the 
early Egyptians were certainly symbolical, so the winged bulls and other 
sacred animal-forms of the Babylonians and Assyrians were also symbolical. 
Moreover, as the oldest Egyptian literature shows that their early conception 
of God was far purer than those which they entertained at a later period, it 
is certainly allowable to inquire whether it may not have been the same in 
the Tigro-Euphratean basin. And, if we make this inquiry, we may be led 
to conclusions exactly contrary to the assumption of most writers upon this 
religion. Indeed, when Sayce says " the Akkadian divinity was the Crea- 
tor," while the Semitic Bel was a begetter (p. 333 ; compare also pp. 143, 367, 
and 368), we see that the transit from Akkadian ideas to Semitic ones, was 
a downward step from a monotheistic to a polytheistic standpoint. This 
corresponds with w^iat we should expect from the contact of the less civilized 
Semite with the more civilized Akkadian. Even the lowest magical conjura- 
tions of the latter continually refer to a " Spirit of Heaven" and " Spirit of 
the Earth " superior to all the dreaded demons of disease and death . 

The whole representation of the development of the religion given in such 
passages as pages 344-368 in Sayce is, therefore, capable or a radical recon- 
struction. Superstition and ignorance were found at every stage of the his- 
tory of this people, but to assume that the ideas of creatorship, sin, forgive- 
ness, immortality, etc., were late products of religious speculation and 
religious development, is contrary to the evidence, and contrary to the 
analogies of other most ancient peoples. 

Some writers, following Lenormant, and apparently without his respect 
for the historic element in the Babylonian myths, reduce the story of Gil- 
games (the name was formerly given as Izdubar or Gisdubar), — to a pure 
product of the imagination, a solar myth (Ragozin, Chaldaea, pp. 318-322). 
Tiele and others have inclined to the same fashionable theory, which, in the 
hands of such mythologists as G. W. Cox, resolves all mythical heroes into 
differing forms of the sun-god. In this case the only evidence in favor of 
such a theory is found in the names and order of the signs of the zodiac in 
Babylonian Astronomy. But even Lenormant saw in these signs, survivals 
of a most ancient belief in a truly historic and real deluge, to wit, that de- 
scribed in Genesis ; and if this be admitted, and if the names of the twelve 



I04 The Religions of the World 

divisions of the zodiac were intentionally commemorative of that catastrophe, 
the ground of the sun-myth theory is so transformed that the annual journey 
of the sun from mansion to mansion around the zodiac becomes a memorial 
journey, — a rehearsal before all eyes, of one of the most stupendous chapters 
in human history. See " Star-story of the Flood,'' Zion's Herald, September 
26, i: 



Qu. 7. — In the poem relating to Gilgames, what other per- 
sonages are associated with him ? See Maspero, Dawn of Civil- 
ization, pp. 574-590, 601, etc. 



Qu. 8. — With what Semitic king does Chaldaean history 
begin, and how has his date been determined ? Records of the 
Past, Vol. I., pp. i-ii. Sayce, H. L., pp. 21-24. 



and the World-Religion. 105 

Qu. 9. — Into what six periods may the total history of this 
religion be divided ? 

Answer. — i. The period anterior to Sargon I, a miglity king of Accad, 
who conquered a vast realm including Elam on the east, and Palestine, and 
even the island of Cypms, on the west. The beginning of his fifty-five 
years' reign is placed by Sayce at 3750 or 3800 B.C. Monumental relics of 
this period are those unearthed by Sarzec at Tel-loh in 1881, and since. 
The kings of Shirpurla, the city of which Tel-loh is the modern name, are 
placed by all authorities as far back as B.C. 4000. See Records of the Past, 
vol. i, p. 6. The evidences of their advanced civilization and extended 
commerce have amazed the archaeologists . Gudea, the best known of these 
rulers, seems to have had commercial intercourse by sea with Egypt. See 
Records of the Past, vol. i, pp. 42-63. Maspero, " Dawn of Civilization," 
pp. 595-620. 

2. The period from Sargon to the establishment of the dynasty headed by 
Sumer-abi at Babylon, B.C. 2394. In this period the most important and 
best attested fact is that Naram-Sin, the son and successor of Sargon, added 
to his father's extended empire the Sinaitic peninsula, and had land com- 
munication with Egypt. 

3. The period of Babylonian supremacy from 2394 to about 1300 B.C. 
The Sixth of this Dynasty was the conquering Khammur-agas or Hammur- 
abi, who reigned 2282 B.C., and who but a short time ago was erroneously 
supposed to have been the first to make the city of Babylon a royal capital. 

4. The period of Assyrian supremacy, from 1300 B.C. until 625 B.C. 
Of the Assyrian kings, Nineveh was the residential capital. In the Assyrian 
language, the name of the country of the Assyrians was written Asstir. 
The name of their supreme god Asur. Asshurbanipal, whose royal library 
under the ruins of Nineveh has afforded us most of our knowledge of this 
ancient literature, was one of the last of the ruling line. Under the second 
or third of his successors the allied Medes and Babylonians led by Cyaxares 
the Mede, destroyed Nineveh so thoroughly as not only to fulfil the prophecy 
of Nahum in a most striking manner, but also to cause the very site of the 
ruins to be forgotten for two and a half milleniums. Respecting the fall of 
Assyria, see Records of the Past, preface to vol. iv, pp. 7-13. 

5. The period of restored Babylonian empire, from B.C. 625 until the 
conquest of the whole valley by Cyrus the Great, 539 B.C. The chief figure 
in this period is Nebuchadnezzar, a son-in-law of Cyaxares ; the most famous 
and dramatic event, the fall of Babylon. See Daniel, ch. v. 

6. Period of decline and dissolution from that time onward. 

Should anyone hesitate to accept the high antiquity now ascribed to Sar- 
gon, it will help his difficulty to remember that the Akkadian astronomy was 



io6 TJie Religions of the Woidd 

already ancient in the day of Sargon (see Sayce, p. 30), and that from inter- 
nal evidence it is highly probable that the primeval Akkadian astronomers 
invented the zodiac and named its signs as early as 4700 B.C. See Sayce, 
pp. 397, 398. Compare also Lenormant, Beginnings of History, pp. 246 fif. 
Lockyer, Davirn of Astronomy [*3922.io5]. Quentin, in Revue de PHis- 
toire des Religions, torn, xxxi, pp. 169 ff. Also, O. D. Miller, Har-Moad. 

Qu. 10. — Give the oldest Chaldaeo-Assyrian names for God. 

Answer. — The Akkadian word for God was Anna or Ana, and it was 
indeclinable except that the full form of the plural was Anap or Anab, The 
corresponding Semitic w^as II, plural Hi, or Ilim, hke the Hebrew El, Elohim. 
The cuneiform character for the singular in each case was written thus : 

Another old Babylonian word for the same idea is Ra. The 
term is seen only in composition, for example, in the names of Babylon. 
Thus in the Semitic it was Bab-il, the Gate of God. But in the Akkadian 
it was Ka-Ra ; Ka signifying gate, and Ra, God. Another name of the same 
city was Ka-Dingi-Ra which means Gate of the mighty God ; or, as Sayce 
gives it. Gate of the Creator God. The being to w]w7}i these names wei'e 
applied was conceived of as nnoriginated. 

Qu. II. — What other proofs of early monotheism among this 
people may be mentioned.'^ 

Answer. — A very interesting survival is found in the use of II in the 
formation of early compound names. The second name in the first Baby- 
lonian dynasty is thus compounded. Boscawen, in his article on "Early 
Semitic Names," in the Babylonian and Oriental Record, Vol. Ill, Numbers 
10 and 12, gives many interesting examples from a period more than 2300 
years before Christ. 

In the Records of the Past, Mr. Pinches, chief Assyriologist of the British 
Museum, gives the translation of the Assyrian royal proclamation supposed 
to have been addressed by Asshurbanipal of Nineveh to his subjects in Baby- 
lon, wherein the King, in language which would have been appropriate in 
the mouth of the prophet Jonah, entreats them " not to commit a sin before 
God," — a sin touching a covenant, which he says is "before God." In 
the same proclamation he swears by his gods Asshur and Merodach ; but in 
the passages just referred to, as the translator says, " It is as if at the time 
he was writing these words the One-God idea was uppermost in his mind.'"' 
Mr. Pinches adds, " This was probably the result of a feeling inherited from 
the time when monotheism more or less pure was the possession of the Sem- 
itic race, or at least of that portion to which the Semitic Babylonians, Assy- 
rians, and the Israelites belong." 



and tJie World-Religion. 107 

Ou. 12. — Name the so-called Great Gods of the later Pan- 
theon ; indicating also their consorts, and chief sanctuaries. 

Answer. — At an early date, though in which of the above-named periods 
we cannot tell, it appears that the sacerdotal schools elaborated a curious 
astrological and mathematical classification of the so-called Great Gods, 
which, while we may not feel at all certain of fully understanding, will yet 
be found a serviceable aid to the memory. It consists of two triads and one 
pentad. 



THE GREAT GODS OF BABYLONIA ASTROLOGICALLY 

ARRANGED. 

First Triad. 

The names and titles in parentheses are Akkadian. 

Anu (Ana). Source of all other divine beings. 

Anat. (Nana) . Sanctuary at Erech. 
Hea (Hea or Ea). Son of Anu. Father of Silik-mulu-ki. 

Davkina (Dav-kina). Sanctuary at Eridu. 
Bel (Mul-lil. En-ki. Irkalla). Son or brother of Anu. 

Belit (Nin-ge or Nin-ki) . Sanctuary at Nippur. 

Seco7id Triad. 

Sin (Inzu or Agu). Moon-god, son of Mul-ge, Lord of Growth. 

" The Great Lady." (Name not yet phonetically determined.) Sanctu- 
ary at Ur. 
Ramanu (Mer-mer or Meru). God of the air and wind. Son of Anu. 

Name also rendered Ao, Ben or Bin, Im or Iva, Pur, Phul or Vul, Rim- 
mon, Uban, Yav, Yen, Yiv. 
Sala or Tala. Sanctuary at Muru. 
Samas or Shamas. (San, Barbar, Ud). The Sun-god, son of Sin. 

Gula (Gula). Later (?). Anuit. Sanctuary at Larsa ; with Anuit at 
Sippara. 

The Pentad. 

Adar (Nin-dar or Nin-ib). Saturn. A manifestation of Anu. 

Belit, represented sometimes as mother, sometimes as wife. Sanctuary 

? ? ? ? 
Merodach (Amar-utuki) . Jupiter. A form of Bel. 

Zir-banit, Zarpanit. Sanctuary at Babylon. 
Nergal (Ner-uru-gal) . Mars. Paternity undetermined. 

Laz. Sanctuary at Cutha. 



io8 The Religions of the World 

ISTAR (Sukus). Venus. 

Dumuzi Thammuz. Son of Ea and Davkina. Sun-god of Eridu. 

Sanctuaries numerous. 
Nebo (Ok? Paku) . Mercury. A form of Ea, or son of Anu. 

Tasmit (Varamit) . Sanctuary at Borsippa. 

Qu. 13. — What appears to have been the origin of this 
highly artificial polytheistic system } 

Answer. — That the primeval Akkadians conceived of Dingi-Ra as per- 
sonal, and as the Supreme God, is conceded even by Tiele (History of 
Rehgion, p. 74). When, however, they conceived of him in his relations 
to the different parts of the universe, they gave him different titles expressive 
of these relations. Thus, as God of the highest heavens he was called Ana, 
which conveyed the idea of the Lofty, the Most High. Considered in his 
relations to the atmosphere and the world-surrounding waters, he was called 
Hea, or Ea.' In his relations to the earth and the under- world beneath the 
earth, he was called Mul-ge, or Mul-lil, which simply means. Lord of the 
earth. It would appear that in process of time, with the gradual loss of the 
realization of the unity of the one Supreme God, these and other names and 
titles came to be conceived of as representing different gods having different 
jurisdictions, attributes and functions. It is very much as if a Roman Catholic 
population, lapsing into ignorance of their own church history and art, should 
come to think of Mater Dolores, Madonna Incoronata, Mater Amabilis, Re- 
gina Cceli or, better yet, the different miracle-working images of the Madonna 
known by these names at different shrines, as different beings to be wor- 
shipped as such. Moreover, as in this case, such a change would be much 
facilitated by the fact that in the pictures and images of the blessed Virgin 
in these different characters, her attributes and symbols and looks are differ- 
ent, and different according to fixed traditional art rules, and according to 
local traditions ; so the like custom of the earliest Babylonians to represent 
Almighty God, Dingi-Ra, under different symbols or forms, according to the 
title under which in a particular temple he was worshipped, would render it 
all the easier for the common people, and indeed for all, to forget the divine 
unity and to personify or hypostisize his names, titles and images. Further- 
more, as soon as a divine title or image had thus become transformed into a 
distinct divine being, his attributes and and titles could in turn give rise to a 
new brood, and so on. So well was this danger understood by the learned, 
even among this people, that in more than one case an Assyrian editor of an 
older Akkadian poem, has taken pains to guard the reader against a similar 
error by stating that all the divine names in it were but titles of one and the 
same god. (See George Smith's Chaldaean Genesis, second ed., pp. 76-78. 

1 " So far as can be discovered, Poseidon was originally Zeus himself in a particular aspect." 
Max Duncker. Similar illustrations abound. 



and the World-Religion. 109 

Records of the Past, vol. i, pp. 60, 61 ; vol. ii, p. 183). Now to these divin- 
ities thus originated, there were soon mythologically given appropriate consorts 
and children ; and thus the gods and lower spirits so multiplied that, at a 
comparatively early period, we find mention of the " fifty great gods.'' Else- 
where we find reference to the " three hundred spirits of heaven," and the 
" six hundred spirits of earth.'' Later yet, as we learn from the inscription 
of Sardanapalus upon the great bulls in the British Museum, the whole num- 
ber of gods in heaven and earth was held to be 4000. In another inscrip- 
tion, we read of 5000 ; in still another, of 65,000. 

Ou. 14. — What appears to have been the cosmological views 
formed by this ancient people ? 

Answer. — The cosmology of the ancient Chaldaeans has not yet been 
fully recovered. In "Paradise Found'" may be seen the most complete 
interpretation obtainable at the time of its publication in 1885. The funda- 
mental points of this interpretation are as follows : 

1. The earth of the ancient Chaldaeans was not flat but spheroidal. (See 
pp. 163, 164.) 

2. The south polar sky was said to under-arch the abode of the dead, as 
the north polar sky over-arches the abode of the living. (Pp. 482, 483.) 

3. The Chaldaean earth presented two antipodal mountains ; the mountain 
of the gods, and the mountain of the demons. (P. 123, footnote.) 

4. The first of these mountains was situated in the highest North. 

a. No evidence that it was in the East or North-east, as sometimes 

stated. (P. 127 ; also 483, third footnote.) 

b. The embarrassments of Lenormant from making the earth of the 

Chaldaeans hollow at the South pole. (P. 115.) 

c. Isaiah (xiv : 13) places this mountain in the highest North. See 

the " Excursus " of Delitzsch. 

d. The heavens rested on and revolved around it. (Pp. 126, 167.) 

e. The analogy of other ancient cosmologies, — Egyptian, Iranian, 

Hindu, etc. (Pp. 169, 171 ; 257 footnote, 123 footnote.) 

Though some of these features were at the time novel, all discoveries and 
new studies of the subject since that time have either confirmed or tended 
to confirm them. Professor Sayce, who previously had always distinguished 
in Babylonian mythology the so-called "mountain of sunset" and "moun- 
tain of sunrise," locating one in the east and the other in the west of the 
Babylonian horizon, now agrees that the poets using these terms probably 
looked upon the mountain behind which the sun rose and set as one and the 
same. See Hibbert Lectures, p. 361. This gives us the one " World-moun- 
tain" described in Paradise Found, pp. 123, 137. He has not attempted, 
however, here or elsewhere, to give his readers a complete view of the cosmos 
as conceived of by the ancient Babylonians. From his obscure and discon- 



1 1 o The Religions of the World 

nected cosmological remarks on pp. ii6, 117, 238, 239, 357, 359-366, it is 
quite impossible to construct such a view. 

The most important treatise upon this general subject in any language is 
the elaborate and costly work by Jensen, entitled " Die Kosmologie der 
Babylonier," Strasburg, 1890. In the more than five hundred and sixty 
octavo pages of this book we find discussed nearly every cosmological term 
and passage thus far discovered in ancient Babylonian texts. The writer 
correctly- ascribes to this ancient people a high degree of astronomical knowl- 
edge. Not only does he credit them with the invention of the zodiac, and 
with a clear discrimination of the planets from the fixed stars, but also holds 
that they correctly discriminated between the pole of the equator and the 
pole of the ecliptic, and correctly determined and characteristically named 
both the tropic of Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn. Add to this the long 
acknowledged fact that they practised, if they did not originate, the division 
of the celestial equator into its three hundred and sixty degrees for longi- 
tudinal reckonings, and the division of the transverse great circles into their 
three hundred and sixty degrees for latitudinal measurements, and it must be 
conceded that they possessed a remarkably advanced scientific conception of 
the starry heavens. 

In constructing the Babylonian earth Jensen is less successful. Following 
earlier writers he makes it a hemisphere hollow underneath, resting upon, 
and as to its hollow filled by, the waters of a world-ocean which fills all space 
except that comparatively small portion between the lower surface of the 
hollow hemispherical earth and the upper surface of the solid over-arching 
vault of heaven. With this conception of the relation of the world-ocean to 
earth and heaven, he naturally can find no place for Du-azag, the '* place of 
the convocation of the gods," but an imaginary cavern in the thin crust of 
the hemisperical earth. Moreover, he has no place for Hades but another 
imaginary cavern in the same crust ; and strangely enough he places his 
Hades cavern far above the cavern assigned to the gods. 

Many of Jensen's individual facts and conclusions conflict with his total 
grouping and suggest a truer interpretation. For example, what he says 
(page 255 and following) of the heavenward aspiring "Mountain of the 
World " with seven zones or stages, would give us for the upper terrestrial 
hemisphere a conception strikingly like the Hindu one of Su-Meru (Paradise 
Found, p. 252). But on page 257 Jensen correctly states that the Baby- 
lonian Hades, with its seven regions separated by seven circular walls with 
gates, was the " counterpart" of the above described mount of seven stages 
or terraces ; and the moment we put these two counterparts together base to 
base, we get not one hollow hemisphere, but a solid sphere whose upper half 
is the lighted abode of the living and whose under half is the dark and 
gloomy abode of the dead. 

In his "Dawn of Civilization," p. 543, Maspero pictorially represents 
Jensen's interpretation with slight modifications that can hardly be called 



mid the World- Religion. 1 1 i 



"ii 



improvements. Maspero does not attempt to locate either tlie abode of the 
dead, or Du-azag. His account of tlie daily movement of the sun from east 
■ to west is even inconsistent with itself. One remark, however, bears with 
striking force on the theory of the north-polar origin of the human race. 
Speaking of the cosmology of the Chaldeeans, he says : " The general resem- 
blance of their theory of the universe to the Egyptian theory leads me to 
believe that they, Jio less than the Egyptians, for a lo?ig ti7ne believed that the 
sn7i and moon revolved round the earth in a horizontal plane.'''' Page 544. 
Compare " Paradise Found," /^i-j-/;/?. 

Qu. 15. — What appear to have been their anthropological 
conceptions } 

Answer. — The anthropology of the Babylonians and Assyrians deserves 
a more careful treatment than it has yet received. Indeed, no master of the 
cuneiform texts seems as yet to have attempted a formal study, however brief, 
on this subject. A few important points, however, seem certain : 

1 . That in the most ancient Chaldaean thought the human race was con- 
ceived of as descended from a single pair. 

2. That the primordial human pair was created by the same aboriginal 
divine power which created all the gods that ever began to be. The priests 
of Babylon ascribed this origination of gods and men to Bel-Merodach, their 
supreme god. The older priests of Eridu gave this honor to Hea. (Lenor- 
mant, Beginnings of History, p. 55.) But compare, also, page 397, where 
Istar represents herself as the mother of men. 

3. The cylinder which George Smith interpreted as portraying the first sin 
affords great probability that the ancient Chaldaeans had the tradition of the 
fall of the first human pair in substantially the same form as that given in 
Genesis. See Ragozin, Chaldsea, pp. 265, 266. Or better, Boscawen, The 
Bible and the Monuments, p. 91. 

4. That they knew the distressing consciousness of sin, and believed in 
the possibility of pardon, is touchingly evident from the ancient penitential 
Psalms such as that beginning, " O my Lord, my great transgression, my many 
sins ! O my God, my great transgression, my many sins ! " Records of the 
Past, First Series, vol. vii, p. 151. 

5 . The firm faith of the Babylonians and Assyrians in immortality and in 
the reception of the good into heaven, appears in many of the deciphered 
monuments. The following is Fox Talbot's translation of a verse from what 
appears to have been a national hymn of Assyria, answering perhaps to Eng- 
land's "God Save the Queen" : 

' ' May he attain to grey hairs 

' ' And old age ; 

" And after the life of these days, 
" In the feasts of the silver mountain, — the heavenly courts. 



112 



The Religions of the World 



** The abode of blessedness, 

" And in the Hght 

" Of the happy fields, 

" May he dwell, a life 

" Eternal, holy, 

" In the presence 

' ' Of the gods 

" That inhabit Assyria." 

Records of the Past, first series, vol. iii, p. 133. The translator adds in a 
note, "There is a fine inscription not yet fully translated, describing the 
soul in heaven clothed with a white radiant garment, seated in the company 
of the blessed, and fed by the gods themselves with celestial food." 

For later and more critical statements under this head, see Jeremias, Die 
Babylonisch-Assyrischen Vorstellu7igen vom Leben nach dem Tode. Leipzig, 
1887. 

Qu. 16. — Illustrate by extracts from the original texts, the 
morals of the Babylonians and Assyrians. 



and the World- Religion. 113 



1 1 4 The Religiojis of the World 



Qu. 17 — What light has cuneiform study thrown upon the 
Bible, and upon the significance of this earliest of ethnic faiths 
for the World-religion ? 

Partial Answer. — The Babylonian and Ass3Tian remains have disclosed 
to us a great variety of traditions, beliefs and historic records strikingly con- 
firmatory of the Old Testament representation of primeval history. We now 
know from sources entirely independent of the Bible that this great people of 
the two rivers believed in earliest times in a supreme and almighty God of 
heaven ; in angels good and bad ; also in the great serpent or dragon, the 
embodiment and symbol at once of subtle intelligence and an evil will ; in a 
creation of the universe in six successive days ; in a degeneracy if not a fall 
of man ; in a civilized antediluvian world governed by ten successive kings, 
who thus answer to the ten patriarchs between Adam and Noah ; in a great 
and general prevalence of sin and violence under the later of these kings ; in 
a determination of the gods to destroy the wicked world ; in a warning to the 
tenth king to build an ark and save himself, his family, and pairs of all 
animals ; in a deluge whose minute details in many cases corresponded to the 
Mosaic account ; in a resettlement of the rescued family in the land of Shinar ; 
and in the attempted but divinely frustrated plan of building a tower to reach 
to heaven . We know that one of their most sacred symbols was a " a tree 
of life,''' and on one very ancient cylinder we find this tree depicted with a 
man upon one side and a woman upon the other, both stretching out their 
hands to pluck the fruit of the tree, while back of and above the woman stands 
a serpent precisely as in a Christian picture of the Fall (See Smith, Chaldaean 
Genesis, p. 91. And for latest evidences, Boscawen, The Bible and the 
Monuments.) We know that their portal-guarding lions and bulls, winged and 
human-headed, possessed symbolical significance strikingly like that of the 
Cherubim posted at the closed gates of forfeited Eden (Lenormant, Begin- 
nings of History, ch. iii). We know that they believed in the possibility of 



and the World- Religion, 1 1 5 

such translations as Enoch's, for they believed that the patriarchal survivor of 
the flood was thus translated. They believed that after the flood the God 
of heaven made a covenant with the rescued family, very much as we read in 
Genesis. They not only abstained from work the seventh day, but believed 
that the Sabbatic institution, which they observed on the seventh, fourteenth, 
twenty-first, and twenty-eighth day of each month, together with a midmonth 
extra on the nineteenth, dated from the creation. Their doctrine and prac- 
tice of sacrifices, animal and other, corresponds with Old Testament repre- 
sentations of the same rite among the patriarchs. In short, their religious 
beliefs, traditions, and usages were precisely what Old Testament history 
would lead us to expect. 

In like manner these recovered tablets have confirmed and illustrated a 
number of the events of secular history, international and other, recorded in 
the Old Testament. Several of the kings of Israel and of Judah are men- 
tioned by name. The Old Testament has told us that Menahem, king of 
Israel, and Ahaz, king of Judah, were both tributary to Tiglath Pileser ; the 
monuments says the same. The Old Testament chronology of the fall of 
Samaria exactly tallies with the date as fixed by Assyrian annals. Senna- 
cherib tells of the same story of the ransom of Jerusalem by Hezekiah as that 
which we read in 2 Kings xviii. 13-16. In 1887 the Biblical account of his 
death and the succession of Esar-haddon was precisely confirmed by the 
Babylonian tablets. Even that exceedingly ancient invasion of Canaan by 
Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, Arioch, king of Ellaser, and Tidal, king of 
nations, recorded in Genesis xiv, is so far confirmed that we have found an 
Elamite dynasty of that age whose royal names were compounded in the 
same way as Chedorlaomer's. (Kudur, signifying servant, with the name of 
a national divinity, thus : Kudur-mabuk or mabog, or, as some have given it, 
Kudur-Nahundi.) Furthermore, it is found that Lagamar, corresponding to 
the Semitic Laomer, was an Elamite goddess ; that Kudur-mabuk, having 
conquered Babylon, extended his power to Canaan ; that he was styled Con- 
queror of the West, and that the name of his son Eri-Aku would be in the 
Semitic the Biblical Arioch. 

Rabbinical and Mohammedan traditions ascribe the rapid and universal 
degeneration of true religion among the early post-diluvian inhabitants of 
Chaldcca largely to the influence of Nimrod. See Josephus, Antiquities, book 
I, ch. iv, sec. 1-3. Also Weil's Biblical Legends, pp. 68-79. Most Christian 
writers have taken the same view. Prof. H. A. H. Ebrard, however, ascribes 
this corruption to the Semites. For his representation see his Christian 
Apologetics, sec. 249-254. 

Whatever may be thought of this view of Nimrod, and Ebrard does not 
attempt to argue the point, there can be little doubt as to the correctness of 
the opinion that in the Assyrian and Babylonian religion we have something 
different from ordinary unsophisticated jDagan ignorance and aspiration. In 
their earliest period no other ancient nation appears to have enjoyed so much 



Ii6 The Religions of the World. 

of true religious light and knowledge ; no other had a clearer, if so clear a 
sense of moral and religious duty, yet no other in the ancient world except 
the West Semites, whose Baal and Astarte worship was borrowed from the 
Babylonians, ever equalled this in undermining the fundamental morality of 
the family, and making promiscuous sexual intercourse an obligatory form of 
divine worship. The chief temple of Babylon was a national house of as- 
signation. Every woman in the empire was required at least once in her life- 
time to visit this temple of harlotry and yield herself to the first man who 
chose her out of the waiting line and led her away to the chambers con- 
secrated to unholy rites. The effect upon the condition of both men and 
women was what might be anticipated. The maidens of the country became 
the merest merchandise. Great annual sales were held where they were sold 
off to the highest bidder. Later, as Herodotus assures us from personal 
knowledge, the poorer people throughout the country sought to save their 
virgins from a worse future by bringing them up to be courtesans by profes- 
sion. Even this pagan Greek saw that here mere paganism was outdone, and 
in describins: the deification of the lust of the flesh which he witnessed in 
Babylon he branded it as aloxt-^Toq. — 'superlatively shameful.' Herodotus, 
book I, sec. 196-199. Only in this connection can we understand that 
wonderful vision of St. John in the Apocalypse, ch. xvii.i — xix. 3 ; as also 
many a dark and perhaps repulsive, but to the Jews plain and needful allusion 
in the Old-Testament prophecies. See e. g. Nahum iii.4-6; Ez. xvi. 16- 
63 ; Is. xlvii. 8-15 ; also Ez. xxiii. and similiar passages. 

Qu. 18. — Fill not less than three pages with original matter 
on one of the following subjects: (i) The Discovery at TeU-el- 
Amarna. (2) History and Literature of the Akkad and Sumir 
problem. (3) What may be learned from the inscription of Sin- 
gashid of Erech, circa 2600 b.c. (Records of the Past, vol. i). 
(4) Earliest known contacts of Chaldseo-Assyria with Egypt 
(R. P. vol iii, 36). (5) Earliest known contacts with the Greeks. 
(6) The genealogical connections, the attributes and functions 
of Merodach at the time of his greatest prominence (Sayce, 
Lect. vii, and hymns to Merodach in the appendix). (7) The 
Chief Temple at Babylon and our sources of information re- 
specting it. (8) Sacred plants, trees, and animals among this 
people. (9) Kinds of prayer, illustrated from the hymns of this 
religion. (10) Catalogue of gods named in Tiglath Pileser's 
Inscription, with their attributes and titles. (11) Scientific 
attainments of the Chaldaeo-Assyrians. (12) Influence of the 
Babylonians and Assyrians upon the world's culture. 



mid the World-Religion. 121 



SPECIMEN STUDIES. 



II. 

The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians Historically, 
Systematically and Philosophically Considered. 

Books of Reference. — For original texts see Records of the Past 
First Series, vols, ii, iv, vi, viii, x, xii, [3049.73]. Second Series/«j-j-/m. 
— The Book of the Dead, ed. by Budge, Lond. 1894 [*Cab. 30.19.1]. 
Renouf's translation in Proceedings of Soc. Bib. Archseol. vols, xiv ff. 
There is an older EngHsh translation by Birch in vol. v of Bun- 
sen's Egypt's Place in Universal History [5046.58]. Davis's edition 
(Putnam's Sons, N.Y., 1895) is a translation of a translation (Pierret's), 
though the original texts are given. — The Papyrus Prisse, " the oldest 
Book in the world," fragments from an ethical work by Kakimna of the 
Third Dynasty and the precepts of Pthah-hotep of the Fifth Dynasty. 
French version by Viray [5053.63]. English translation from the 
French by Howard Osgood in the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1888, 
with additions from the maxims of Ani. A later translation of the pre- 
cepts of Pthah-hotep is given in Records of the Past, new series, vol. iii, 

PP- 1-35- 

The best of English treatises on this religion are Renouf, Religion 

of Ancient Egypt [5483.52], and Tiele, History of Egyptian Rehgion, 
[3026.58]. — The best of German expositions are. Von Strauss and 
Tornay, Der Altagyptischer Glaube, 1891, 2 vols. [3493.72], and 
Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1885, 2 vols. 
[3490a. 74]. — The latest and best general history of the Egyptian 
people is that now appearing from the pens of W. M. Flinders-Petrie 
and others, vol. i, N. Y., 1895 [3059.175]. The following histories, 
however, are still valuable, to wit, that by Brugsch, 1881 [5072.56] ; 
by Geo. Rawlinson, 1882 [5072.57] ; by Duncker, 1878 [2213.56]. 
On Egyptian art, manners and customs, see Maspero's Archaeology, 
1887 ; Wilkinson's manners and customs, 2d ed. [3059.65] ; and 
Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, 1895 [S^S^' 141] ; Erman, Life in An- 
cient Egypt 1894 [3042.135]. — For the latest explorations and 



122 The Religions of the World 

discoveries see the Archaeological Reports and Memoirs of the Egypt 
Exploration Fund, London. — The wealth of works on Egyptology in 
the Public Library was well presented in the Library Bulletin for Octo- 
ber, 1893. Very convenient, as the shelf-numbers are given. — In Jas- 
trow's series of Handbooks on the History of religion, one on the Relig- 
ion of Egypt, by Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson of Philadelphia, is announced 
for pubHcation in 1897. 

I. To v^hat has the land of Egypt been likened? See map 
in Martin Brimmer's Three Essays on Egyptian History, Re- 
ligion and Art. Boston, 1892. 



2. In vi^hat particulars is the river Nile unique.-^ 



3. Whence came the founders of Egyptian civilization ac- 
cording to Maspero ? See Dawn of Civilization, p. 45. Whence 
according to Flinders-Petrie ? History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 14, 
141. 



and the World-Religion, 



123 



4. From Records of the Past, vol. ii, p. 204, give Marietta's 
Scheme of Egyptian Chronology. 

Old Empire (Dynasties I-XI) ... years 

Middle Empire (Dynasties XII-XIV) 
Shepherd Kings (Dynasties XV-XVII) 
New Empire (Dynasties XVIII-XXX) 

Total 

How nearly does Mr. Petrie's agree with this ? See his His- 
tory. 



5. Under which of the dynasties does civilization appear to 
have reached its highest perfection ? 



124 '^^^ Religiojts of the World 



6. Of all the gods of the Egyptians, which was the oldest ? 

In answering this question we must not of necessity expect to find 
him one of the most prominent or popular of their great gods in his- 
toric times. Zeus among the Greeks was called the " Father of gods 
and men," yet in Greek thought he was but the grandson of the eldest 
god. So too with the Latins, Jupiter was not the first divine being. 
In fact, in Egypt the eldest god was so far forgotten that in forty lists 
of gods preserved to us by the monuments, he is mentioned but four 
times, and in each case at the very end of the list. The name of this 
god was Nu, or as sometimes anciently written Nun. From all the 
texts in which it occurs it is plain that the term designated the unorigi- 
nated and righteous God of heaven. Victor Von Strauss in his recent 
work reviews these texts, and concludes as follows : " According to these 
testimonies there is no doubt that in Nu there has been preserved a remi- 
niscence of that universal Heaven-god who once belonged to undivided 
Humanity, and that for the Egyptians also there was a time when they 
had as yet this God alone." One striking inscription by Seti I, of the 
19th Dynasty, expressly calls him "the oldest god." Here, therefore, 
was a form of monotheism antedating all the polytheism of the later 
ages. 

This name is of curious interest because of its resemblance to Anu, 
the oldest heaven-god of the Babylonians and Assyrians. See Hommel, 
Babylonischer Ursp7'ung der Aegyptischeii Kultur [3053.154]. It may 
be that this primordial Nu was the root of the Egyptian word for 
god, NiUe?\ pi. Nutriu. It is also noteworthy that the Egyptians called 
the chief city of the gods in their heavenly world Anu. In their sacred 
language they gave the same name to the earthly counterpart or repre- 
sentation of this celestial city, i. e. to Heliopolis. On, the Hebrew 
name for Heliopolis, came from the sacred name in Egyptian by drop- 
ping the final vowel and broadening the A to O. As the Hebrews also 
had a heavenly as well as a secondary earthly city, Zi-on, it is not im- 
possible that in this sacred name we have a terminal element old 
enough to have belonged to human speech before the far-off ancestors 
of both the Semites and Egyptians lost the power of understanding 
each other. (Z/= of 'spirit ' or ' life.' On = * the divine abode.') 



and the World-Religion, 125 

7. Which appear to have been the oldest of the gods which 
succeeded Nu ? 

Answer. The pailit mUirii, or first divine Ennead, consisting of 
Shu and Tefnut, Seb and Nut, Usiri (Osiris) and Usit (Isis), Set and 
Nebt'hat (Nephthys), and lastly Har or Hor (Horus). These nine 
constitute a family group independent of all local and provincial influ- 
ences, and evidently of central significance in the pantheon presented 
in historic times. They are found in thirty-two of the ancient lists of 
gods, and always in the same order, however numerous or variant the 
local or provincial divine names which in those lists may precede or 
follow. The most natural explanation of this is that the Ennead repre- 
sents the pantheon of the ancestors of the historic Egyptians at a time 
antedating the division of the country into nomes, and the dispersion of 
the people into separate nome-populations with peculiar local and pro- 
vincial divinities and cults. 

8. Under what influence chiefly does the primeval monothe- 
ism of this people appear to have given place to the polytheism 
of the Ennead-worshippers .-* 

Answer. Under the influence of a naive cosmogonical and anthro- 
pogonical speculation. As the modern scientist distinguishes and gives 
names to as many distinct " forces "as he may find necessary to explain 
the operations he sees in the world of nature and in the world of man, 
so the primitive myth-makers distinguished and named divine agents — 
as many and as strong as seemed needful for the explanation of the 
obvious facts. And as the " forces " of the modern scientists are only 
forms of the one persistent and everywhere present cosmic force, so 
the divine agents of the early myth-makers were little more than indi- 
vidualized forms or expressions of the one omnipresent, beginningless 
and endless Cosmic Agent. Thus the scientific impulse underlay the 
earliest myth-making, even as the mythopoeic tendency is even now not 
unfrequently seen in the wholly fanciful theorizings of some cultivators 
of natural science. Thus, too, it is easy to understand how the 
so-cafled " equivalence of forces " in science has in many mythologies, 
but especially in the Egyptian, a kind of counterpart which one is 
tempted to call an "equivalence of divinities." The temporary assump- 
tion of the form of Hat-hor by the " Divine Eye " in the legend of the 
" Destruction of Men," is an illustration in point. At Denderah the 



126 The Religions of the World 

same goddess was called Isis, at Memphis, Sechet, at Sais, Neith, at 
Bubastis, Bast, etc., etc. 

9. Illustrate more fully the foregoing account of the origin of 
Egyptian polytheism. 

Every ancient people, at the beginning of its mythologizing period, 
found itself living upon the verdant earth beneath the vaulted sky. It 
had of course to form for itself some artless conception of the origin of 
these, — some idea of the superhuman power by which the heaven was 
lifted and sustained, — some idea of the superhuman force by which 
the verdant earth called forth and perpetually renewed its vestment of 
trees and grains and grasses. Of course heaven was high ; no man, no 
being less than a god, could be its upraiser and supporter. The 
Egyptians pictured such a god as standing on the green earth and sus- 
taining the starry heaven upon his upstretched hands above his head. 
They called this far-off prototype of Atlas, this heaven-supporter, Shu. 
(See pictures of him in Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, pp. 99, 127, 129, 
169.) And who but a gentle goddess could sustain the tender verdure 
of the boundless earth ? No merely human power could do it. And 
who could the gentle goddess be but the sweet dew or the fructifying 
shower which comes down from heaven? What would a modern poet 
have called her? Heaven-moisture? That is precisely what the 
ancient prehistoric Egyptians did when they named her Tef nut : tef sig- 
nifying '' moisture," and nut, " heaven." So it came to pass that in the 
primordial Egyptian polytheism Shu and Tefnut were the first divine 
pair. In some texts Shu seems to have been known by the title Anhur, 
which von Strauss translates " Bringer (?) of the height of heaven." The 
form "Anhur-Shu" often occurs. He is given a wonderful "lance," 
on which he causes the heavens to revolve and with which he is said to 
rule them. For a curious parallel see Paradise Found, pp. 350-358. 
Anhur was patron of Tini (This or Thinis near Abydos) before Menes, 
who was of the royal house of Tini, had founded Memphis and the 
earliest Egyptian Empire. 

But if heaven thus first became heaven by being uplifted by Shu and 
supplied with vapors by Tefnut, it was an easy and natural step to say 
that Nut (heaven) was the daughter of Shu and Tefnut. This step the 
ancient Egyptians took. But as Seb, that is, the earth, is the only natu- 
ral counterpart of heaven, Seb, and Nut became the second divine 
pair. From these proceeded the remainder of the nine great gods, on 



and the World-Religion. 127 

which account the pair were often styled " Father and Mother of the 
gods." As to their names, Nut is simply the feminine form of the word 
Nu, the name, as we saw, of the one original heaven-god who preceded 
the whole polytheistic brood. Seb is read by Burgsh Qeb, the word 
seems to mean something '' curved " or '' round." As the initial sign of his 
name was a ''goose," his name was of often pictorially expressed in in- 
scriptions by depicting a goose. Hence also in poetic phrase he is 
called " The great Cackler." Sometimes for the same reason the earth is 
called his " ^g%,^^ an expression which like many others shows that even 
then the earth was conceived to be of spherical or spheroidal form. 

But thus far we have no light upon the origin of Man. Whence 
must this godlike rational being be thought to have come ? Here an- 
cient Egyptian mythology, like several others, seems to have made a 
discrimination very creditable to its authors. It appears to have as- 
sumed that the origination of wild men, men destitute of rational ideas 
and modes of living, presented no serious problem. These could be 
considered as biological forms produced by nature's overflowing and 
spontaneous life, like the animals which they so much resemble. But 
a rational and kingly man, the first civilizer of these lawless hordes, the 
introducer of well-ordered government and pure morals — this is a dif- 
ferent, a higher being, one so godlike in nature and work that, though 
human in form, his origin cannot have been less than divine. The first 
such beneficent and kingly man of which the mythology of the Egyp- 
tians told them was Usiri, son of Set. His sister and spouse was Usit. 
Following the Greeks we commonly write them Osiris and Isis. Their 
son was Horus the Elder. To the Egyptians, then, Usiri, though of 
divine parentage, was the first full-fledged normal man. To them he was 
what Yama was to the ancestors of the Hindus and Yima to the ancestors 
of the Persians. Moreover, as Yama became Lord of the dead to the 
Hindus, and Yima to the Persians, so to the Egyptians, Osiris, the first 
of normal rational men, became the just and righteous Lord of Amenti, 
the world of departed spirits. 

Two further names alone remain of nine. These are Set arid Nebt'hat, 
brother and sister to Usiri and Usit. Nebt'hat is more familiar in the 
Greek spelling Nephthys. Set, originally a good divinity, became at a 
later time an evil one, and figures as such even in the myth of Osiris in 
the oldest form known to us. See Renouf, pp. 119, 120. 

Recapitulating then the foregoing, and placing the members of the 
Ennead in their due genealogical relations, we obtain the following 
easily-remembered table, to wit : — 



128 The Religio7is of the World 

I. Shu 2. Tefnut 

3. Seb 4. Nut 

5. Usiri— 6. Usit 7. Set — 8. Nebt'hat 

9. Horus 

(Maspero writes : 2. Tefnuit, 3. Sibu, 4. Nuit, 7. Sit, and 8. Nebt- 
hait.) 

It is interesting to observe that we have no proof that any temple or 
shrine was ever dedicated to the god Nu, or to any one of the first four 
of this group of nine. Every nome and great city of Egypt had its 
special patron divinities, often a triad or ennead of them, but among 
all the names of these one never finds Nu or any of the four just 
indicated. It would seem as if Osiris was the first of the gods suffi- 
ciently near to men in nature and sympathy to call forth the worship 
of the Egyptians. He, as the first great law-giver among men, and as 
the righteous judge of every soul as it enters the world of the dead, be- 
came and remained the most permanently and uniformly conspicuous 
of all the divinities revered upon the shores of the Nile. To each of 
the members of his family, shrines were early dedicated and divine 
honors paid. To his grandson Horus these early honors were so abun- 
dant that the Egyptians of the historic ages, looking back to the pre- 
historic period, were accustomed to call it the period of the '' Horus 
worshippers." According to some, the immemorial Sphinx, possibly the 
oldest, certainly the vastest and noblest of all the divine symbols 
ever shaped by human hand, is a relic of this prehistoric Horus-wor- 
ship — a sublime embodiment of its serenity, power and mystery. 

10. What two other important gods found universal recogni- 
tion before the beginning of the historic period? 

Answer. Ra the sun-god and T'hut, in Hellenized form Thoth, the 
moon-god (Renouf writes it Tehuti). In the ancient lists which in- 
clude these divine names, Ra usually precedes the nine gods, while 
Thoth follows next after them. Sometimes they were called *' the eyes 
of Horus," in which case Horus would seem to be a form or persona- 
tion of the heaven-god. The oldest and most splendid seat of Ra-wor- 
ship was at Heliopolis. Its name Pi-ra, " City of Ra," reminds one o 



and the World-Religion. i2g 

the sacred name of ancient Babylon, Ka-ra, " Gate of God." See 
above, p. oo Ra, however, had various forms with corresponding names, 
such as Turn, Ra-tum, Nefertum, Ra-harmakhis, Chepra or Cheprer, 
Khopri, Mentu, and perhaps Sebek. These names appear originally to 
to have designated the sun in different positions or relations (''I am 
called Khopri in the morning, Ra at noon, and Turn in the evening "). 
Though originally simply a sun-god he was early developed into a much 
more commanding figure, a god to whom the creation of the world, and 
even of all the gods except Nu, was reverently ascribed. His prominence 
in the theology and worship of historic times seems hardly consistent 
with the curious legend relating to his abdication and retirement before 
the inauguration of the reign of Shu. (Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, 
pp. 160-169.) Here he figures as the god of the long-lost Golden Age 
of the world. Often he was pantheistically conceived of as the divine 
essence of other great gods, who accordingly, to express this, were given 
his name in addition to their own, as, e. g., Amen became Amen-ra ; 
Khem, Khem-ra, etc. 

On Thoth see Renouf, pp. 120, 121. 

11. In what goddess have we an illustration of the polytheis- 
tic tendency to multiply divinities by the hypostasizing of a 
title } (See above, p. 106.) 

Answer. Hat-hor. The name signifies " house of Horus." As in 
one of the oldest of the pyramid inscriptions Horus is spoken of as 
" son of Hat-hor," it is almost certain that the name originally applied 
as a title to Usit, his mother. Its naturalness in that application is en- 
tirely apparent, yet as under this name its bearer was constantly and 
pre-eminently associated with Horus, it was equally inevitable that she 
should in time come to be thought of as a goddess distinct from Usit 
and conjugally paired with Horus. In some passages she seems to be 
identified with the blue sky and hardly distinguishable from Nut. In 
later times there came to be *' seven Hat-hors," and they corresponded 
very closely to the fates in Greek mythology. A cow or a female figure 
with a cow's head was the symbol of each. Hence the fitness of the 
imagery of Pharaoh's dream, the seven lean kine and the seven fat 
kine for the fated years of famine and plenty. 

12. What evidences of monotheism in the Egyptian religion 
are given by Renouf ? See pp. 95-107, also 225. 



130 TJie Religions of the World 



13. How does the so-called "Oldest Book in the World" 
speak of God ? See Professor Osgood in the Bibliotheca Sacra 
for October, 1888. 



and the World-Religion. 131 



14. What striking admission touching this matter is made 
by Tiele ? 

Answer. That " the very oldest monuments " give evidence that 
'' there existed a full conviction of the unity of the Deity even when he 
is called by various names"; and that this in Egypt "was no new 
doctrine resulting from later theological speculations," See Hist, of 
the Egyptian Religion, 1882, p. 82. This admission is all the weigh- 
tier in view of what five years earlier he had said in sections 30 and 31 
of his Outlines of the History of Religion. 

15. What remarkable religious movement was inaugurated 
by Amenhotep IV (Khu-enaten), and how have scholars attempt- 
ed to explain it? Tiele, pp. 161-165, and others. 



16. What are the difficulties and inconsistencies of Maspero's 
successive accounts of the cosmology of the Egyptians ? Com- 
pare articles in Revue de I'Hist. des Religions, tom. xv-xviii' 
Les Contes Populaires, pp. Ixi-lxiii. — Egyptian Souls and their 
Worlds, in New Princeton Review, July, 1888. — The Dawn 



132 The Religions of the World 

of Civilization, pp. 16 ff. — Etudes de Mythologie et Archeologie 
Egyptiennes [3052.132]. Answer may be in the form of a 
class essay. 

17. Did the Egyptians consider all men descended from a 
single pair } 

Answer. No decisive evidence for or against such a belief has been 
found in the texts thus far deciphered. 

18. Are there any traces of a tradition of the Fall of Man 
or of the Deluge.? See Lenormant, Beginnings of History, pp. 
443-453 ; Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, pp. 164 ff. Brugsch, 
Die neiie Weltord7inng nach Vernichtung des silndigen Mensehen- 
geschlechtes. [5054.56] 



19. In Egyptian theology, how were individual men to be 
saved from sin and its punishment.-* 



and the World- Religion. 133 



20. Describe the Egyptian picture of the weighing of the 
soul at the final Judgment, naming the attendent personages, 
etc. Contrast the Psychostasia in ^schylus. 



21. Of what divinities and what doctrines have you found 
representations in the Egyptian department of the Museum of 
Fine Arts ? 



134 ^/^^ Religions of the World 



22. What was the Egyptian conception of the origin and 
significance of animal sacrifice? Maspero, Dawn of Civihzation, 
pp. 167, 168. 



23. With what worthy ideas and influences does Tiele credit 
the Egyptian religion in the last chapter of his book thereon .-* 



and the World-Religion, 135 



24. Investigate and to the extent of not less than three 
pages, report upon one of the following topics : (i) The Orien- 
tations of Egyptian Temples (see Lockyer's Dawn of Astron- 
omy). (2) Theories and Facts relating to the Great Pyramid. 
(3) The Science of the Ancient Egyptians. (4) Their Arts. 
(5) Symbolism in Egyptian religion. (6) Interpretations of the 
Phoenix myth. (7) The Sphinx; opinions of professed Egypto- 
logists respecting its age and significance. (8) Mosaism and 
the Egyptian religion ; likenesses and differences. (9) Historic 
Contacts and Relationships of the Israelites and Egyptians. 
(10) The Decline and Fall of Egyptian religion. 



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7. Dates of absence from class exercises, if any : 

8. Difficulties, or qtiestions for explanation in class : 



]^^Sig?z in proper blank on the reverse, and pass in folded. 



o 



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For tJie fortnig]it closing with this date 

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FORTNIGHTLY REPORT. 



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